Decision Support Systems in Agriculture: Some Successes and a Bright Future - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 313

written literature does not provide access to the knowledge written there. Nevertheless,
producers and growers are intensely aware of, and clearly survive on visual information.
We began an attempt to explore the possibility of stimulating awareness and transfer of
information, or learning by a completely visual approach. This was a completely visual
guide to the installation of a water conservation technology called “Amenagement en
courbes de niveau” (ACN) in West Africa. This water conservation technique was
developed by CIRAD (Gigou, 2006) and later characterized (Kablan et al., 2008). Adoption of
the technology was slow, in part, due to the requirement for expert delineation of the
contours in the field. Demand for the technology far out-stripped the availability of the local
scientific staff. Professional staff are required to survey the hydrological issues in the field
and devise strategies to handle the issues and locate the contours. The visual aid, Visual
ACN, illustrated in Appendix 3, is proposed to illustrate, inform, and instruct in the
installation and maintenance of the technology including the illiterate, which often may be
women farmers, for example. The decision-aid in this case was not a computer software;
rather it was a simple guide based on a sequence of two figures or drawings per page
illustrating the condition and the solution on each page. We have conducted test
distributions of the guide, which have stimulated substantial interest among local producers
and growers (Figure 4).
Fig. 4. Long time, successful ACN (Amenagement en Courbes de Niveau) user, M. Zan
Diarra, Siguidolo, Mali, West Africa examines the Visual ACN decision-aid with interest
(photo: R.Kablan). How to assess what he might be remembering or learning from the visual
information?