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.
Precision Agriculture is a cyclic optimization process where data have to be collected from the field, analysed and evaluated and finally used for decision making for site-specific management of the field. Smart farming technologies (SFT) cover all these aspects of precision agriculture and can be categorized in data acquisition, data analysis and evaluation and precision application technologies. Data acquisition technologies include GNSS technologies, mapping technologies, data acquisition of environmental properties and machines and their properties. Data analysis and evaluation technologies comprise the delineation of management zones, decision support systems and farm management information systems. Finally, preci-
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