Decision Support Systems in Agriculture: Some Successes and a Bright Future - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 292

complex yet critical elements of human food security, partially through the capture of
relevant knowledge and also through facilitating the accelerated learning/acquisition of the
knowledge by others, and also through improvement in that knowledge as a result of the
organization and representation effort.
This chapter will describe some of the authors' experience with decision-aids and their
characteristics that have been useful in agriculture. The initial motivation to develop a
decision-aid derived from the confluence of four conditions occurring at the onset of a
newly formed, foreign technical assistance project in Indonesia (TropSoils, 1981):
1. The goal of the project was to provide improved soil and crop management for
Transmigrants (farmers and producers from the “over-populated” rural areas of Java,
Indonesia) in their new environment on Sumatra with relatively large amounts of land,
but little land with the water needed for paddy rice cultivation, the system anticipated
by government planners and desired by some farmers. The new homesteads in Sumatra
provided little land suitable for paddy rice production. The more extensive land
differed drastically from that on Java by being exceedingly acid, with pH values of 4.0
to 4.5 and high levels of plant toxic aluminum. Aluminum saturation values frequently
exceeded 50%, indicating probable toxicity to food crop plants such as maize ( Zea mays ,
L), peanut ( Arachis hypogea , L.), and especially mung bean ( Vigna radiata ). Other soil
constraints to food crop productivity included low levels of essential soil nutrients
(phosphorus, potassium), which also were constraints rare in the rich Javanese soils.
Thus the need was great to provide new ways for the Transmigrants to produce food
and secure a livelihood in this strange, new environment.
2. Two US universities were tapped to provide the technical assistance (North Carolina
State University, and the University of Hawai`i at Manoa). These universities had
extensive experience dealing with soils taxonomically identical (Paleudults 1 ) to those at
the project site (Sitiung, West Sumatra). The immediate challenge was “How could the
experience of producers and growers in the SouthEast US, Central and South America,
which was largely experiential, but also recently scientific, be efficiently introduced and
shared with the Transmigrants,” who were in immediate need of food production
technology on their new, but unfamiliar land.
3. A new perspective had just appeared in international agricultural development
research circles, that of Farming Systems Research and Development (Shaner et al.,
1982). The approach pointed out that farmers should be respected and very much
involved in attempts to introduce new technology and practice. This approach also
seemed to coalesce with Agroecosystems Analysis, as advocated by South East Asian
scientists in the SUAN network (Rambo and Sajise, 1984).
4. Recent developments in information technology, specifically the new capabilities of
software development efforts associated with Artificial Intelligence (Rich, 1983), were
purported to permit medical diagnosis (Hayes-Roth et al., 1983). It was hypothesized at
the time that the detection and possibly the prescription of soil and crop management
solutions to the weathered, acid soils, would be analogous to the diagnosis and
prescription of appropriate medication in similarly complex human health situations.
With this motivation the initial decision-aids were developed with the perhaps pompous
title of “expert systems”(Yost et al., 1988).
1 Paleudults are soils of the Ultisol order, which are particularly old and highly weathered, associated
with high, usually year-long rainfall. See Buol, S.W., F.D. Hole, and R.J. McCracken. 1989. Soil Genesis
and Classification. 3rd ed. Iowa State University, Ames.