Several "expert systems" have been developed to assist decision making by farmers and storekeepers during grain storage. The continued decline in the number of professional advisers makes these developments vitally important. However, the costs and time inputs needed to develop a system are considerable and may not always be available. As part of a European Union funded project on the storage of malting barley, a new approach to the development of computerized advisory systems has been used. An encyclopaedia of information was built as a word processor file. Where gaps in the available knowledge were identified, target research was done to provide the necessary data. Hyperlinks were added to enable users to navigate the system quickly and to select specific topic areas. A decision-support system was devised based on primary risk (giving safe storage times before mould develops or germination declines significantly). Secondary risks, giving safe storage times based on the times taken by insects or mites to complete their life cycles, were also covered and a classification of dormancy categories made. The final system was then copied as 'read-only' files onto a CD for assessment. In developing the system, the importance of close contact between scientists and industry became apparent.

If injury (I) of stored commodities becomes a unit of measurement of quality damage (D), the two terms need not be distinguished. It is proposed that the location aspect of sampling of I and D parameters may help to introduce an "I-D concept" into the storage and marketing of crop commodities, thereby potentially increasing field and storage economic injury level equations (EILs). The injury of stored commodity should be estimated in the store and damage to the marketable-commodity should be measured after stocking it out of the store. The harvest or stocking-out corrective interface provides farmers with an opportunity to convert quality damage caused by injurious organisms into quantity damage. Non-injurious biological contamination without any weight loss can be identified. This may lead to higher pest tolerance (non-zero EIL) during the storage of a commodity. Non-zero tolerance generally creates much more favourable conditions for accepting biological control and partial crop resistance for the management of pests of stored products and other product-quality sensitive types of agricultural environment.