a b s t r a c tFarm Management Information Systems (FMIS) in agriculture have evolved from simple farm recordkeeping into sophisticated and complex systems to support production management. The purpose of current FMIS is to meet the increased demands to reduce production costs, comply with agricultural standards, and maintain high product quality and safety. This paper presents current advancements in the functionality of academic and commercial FMIS. The study focuses on open-field crop production and centeres on farm managers as the primary users and decision makers. Core system architectures and application domains, adoption and profitability, and FMIS solutions for precision agriculture as the most information-intensive application area were analyzed. Our review of commercial solutions involved the analysis of 141 international software packages, categorized into 11 functions. Cluster analysis was used to group current commercial FMIS as well as examine possible avenues for further development. Academic FMIS involved more sophisticated systems covering compliance to standards applications, automated data capture as well as interoperability between different software packages. Conversely, commercial FMIS applications targeted everyday farm office tasks related to budgeting and finance, such as recordkeeping, machinery management, and documentation, with emerging trends showing new functions related to traceability, quality assurance and sales.

Future and even current European farmers are experiencing that the managerial tasks for arable farming are shifting to a new paradigm, requiring increased attention to economic viability and the interaction with the surroundings. To this end, an integration of information systems is needed to advise managers of formal instructions, recommended guidelines and documentation requirements for various decision making processes. In the EU funded project FutureFarm, a new model and prototype of a new Farm Information Management System (FMIS) which meets these changing requirements will be developed. The aim of the work presented in this paper is to define and analyse the system boundaries and relevant decision processes for such a novel FMIS as a prerequisite for a dedicated information modelling. The boundaries and scope of the system are described in terms of actors and functionalities, where actors are entities interfacing with the system (e.g. managers, software, databases). In order to analyse the complex and soft systems situations of how to develop an effective FMIS, which effectively meets farmers' changing needs a conceptual model was developed based on soft systems methodology (SSM) and based on information derived from four pilot farms representing diverse conditions across the EU that are partners of the FutureFarm project. The system components were depicted as part of rich pictures and linked to the subsequent derived conceptual model of the overall system as an outline for the development of the specific FMIS requirements. This research has shown the benefit of using dedicated system analysis methodologies as a preliminary step to the actual design of a novel farm management information system compared with other more rigid and activity oriented system analysis methods.

This paper presents a methodological framework for the systematic literature review of agricultural sustainability studies. The framework synthesizes all the available literature review criteria and introduces a two-level analysis facilitating systematization, data mining, and methodology analysis. The framework was implemented for the systematic literature review of 38 crop agricultural sustainability assessment studies at farm-level for the last decade. The investigation of the methodologies used is of particular importance since there are no standards or norms for the sustainability assessment of farming practices. The chronological analysis revealed that the scientific community’s interest in agricultural sustainability is increasing in the last three years. The most used methods include indicator-based tools, frameworks, and indexes, followed by multicriteria methods. In the reviewed studies, stakeholder participation is proved crucial in the determination of the level of sustainability. It should also be mentioned that combinational use of methodologies is often observed, thus a clear distinction of methodologies is not always possible.

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COVID-19 and the restrictive measures towards containing the spread of its infections have seriously affected the agricultural workforce and jeopardized food security. The present study aims at assessing the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on agricultural labor and suggesting strategies to mitigate them. To this end, after an introduction to the pandemic background, the negative consequences on agriculture and the existing mitigation policies, risks to the agricultural workers were benchmarked across the United States’ Standard Occupational Classification system. The individual tasks associated with each occupation in agricultural production were evaluated on the basis of potential COVID-19 infection risk. As criteria, the most prevalent virus transmission mechanisms were considered, namely the possibility of touching contaminated surfaces and the close proximity of workers. The higher risk occupations within the sector were identified, which facilitates the allocation of worker protection resources to the occupations where they are most needed. In particular, the results demonstrated that 50% of the agricultural workforce and 54% of the workers’ annual income are at moderate to high risk. As a consequence, a series of control measures need to be adopted so as to enhance the resilience and sustainability of the sector as well as protect farmers including physical distancing, hygiene practices, and personal protection equipment.