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In Australia, a land subject to high annual variation in grain yields, farmers find it challenging to adjust crop production inputs to yield prospects. Scientists have responded to this problem by developing Decision Support Systems, yet the scientists’ enthusiasm for developing these tools has not been reciprocated by farm managers or their advisers, who mostly continue to avoid their use. Preceding papers in this series described the FARMSCAPE intervention: a new paradigm for decision support that had significant effects on farmers and their advisers. These effects were achieved in large measure because of the intensive effort which scientists invested in engaging with their clients. However, such intensive effort is time consuming and economically unsustainable and there remained a need for a more cost-effective tool. In this paper, we report on the evolution, structure, and performance of Yield Prophet®: an internet service designed to move on from the FARMSCAPE model to a less intensive, yet high quality, service to reduce farmer uncertainty about yield prospects and the potential effects of alternative management practices on crop production and income. Compared with conventional Decision Support Systems, Yield Prophet offers flexibility in problem definition and allows farmers to more realistically specify the problems in their fields. Yield Prophet also uniquely provides a means for virtual monitoring of the progress of a crop throughout the season. This is particularly important for in-season decision support and for frequent reviewing, in real time, of the consequences of past decisions and past events on likely future outcomes. The Yield Prophet approach to decision support is consistent with two important, but often ignored, lessons from decision science: that managers make their decisions by satisficing rather than optimising and that managers’ fluid approach to decision making requires ongoing monitoring of the consequences of past decisions.

Global food security requires eco-efficient agriculture to produce the required food and fiber products concomitant with ecologically efficient use of resources. This eco-efficiency concept is used to diagnose the state of agricultural production in China (irrigated wheat–maize double-cropping systems), Zimbabwe (rainfed maize systems), and Australia (rainfed wheat systems). More than 3,000 surveyed crop yields in these three countries were compared against simulated grain yields at farmer-specified levels of nitrogen (N) input. Many Australian commercial wheat farmers are both close to existing production frontiers and gain little prospective return from increasing their N input. Significant losses of N from their systems, either as nitrous oxide emissions or as nitrate leached from the soil profile, are infrequent and at low intensities relative to their level of grain production. These Australian farmers operate close to eco-efficient frontiers in regard to N, and so innovations in technologies and practices are essential to increasing their production without added economic or environmental risks. In contrast, many Chinese farmers can reduce N input without sacrificing production through more efficient use of their fertilizer input. In fact, there are real prospects for the double-cropping systems on the North China Plain to achieve both production increases and reduced environmental risks. Zimbabwean farmers have the opportunity for significant production increases by both improving their technical efficiency and increasing their level of input; however, doing so will require improved management expertise and greater access to institutional support for addressing the higher risks. This paper shows that pathways for achieving improved eco-efficiency will differ among diverse cropping systems.

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