A Computerised System to Support Environmental Management in Agriculture

This paper describes a computer-based system to support environmental management in agriculture. The overall aim of the system is to encourage and promote environmental responsibility through good agricultural practice with a profitable farming business. The system enables the user to assess environmental performance of a specific farm by comparison with sound practice and good housekeeping. The user can evaluate environmental impact by estimating environmental burdens using in-built mathematical models, expert systems, databases and utilising statistical information drawn from over a hundred years of agricultural research. A simple scoring approach has been used to quantify the scale of the impacts. A fully integrated hypertext advisory system has been developed to support these performance evaluations and also to aid the farmer navigate the wealth of information, science and legislation that is available. This paper details the system design and reports the progress to date.