GeoBox: design and evaluation of a tool for resilient and decentralised data management in agriculture

ABSTRACT

Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) are an important core component of modern farming companies as they allow, e.g. to document activities, create fertilisation plans, and feed digital equipment with required data. Since the entire agricultural sector is an essential component of food production, high standards of resilience should be established in the involved companies. Accordingly, the used software should also be designed with high standards on reliability and crisis capability. Based on a literature review, we found that software for farmers with certain resilience needs is lacking. Thus, we designed and evaluated a new FMIS concept with the user-centred design method. By conducting focus groups (two rounds, total N = 57) in 2017 and 2019, we raised specific front-end and back-end requirements of farmers. Based on the requirements, we developed our concept for both front- and back-end in terms of a decentralised and offline-working FMIS. Through the evaluation with practitioners (N = 16) of the implemented concept, we derived findings and implications, highlighting the need for privacy, stability, and offline-capability, as well as the UI-requirement to be supportive, e.g. with easy to understand icons and terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Digitalisation and resilience in agriculture
• farm management information systems
• dezentralised data management
• human–computer interaction
• system usability evaluation

Acknowledgments

We would also like to thank our project partners as well as Elmar von Radziewski and Roxanne Keller for their valuable support during the first pre-study. Furthermore, parts of the second pre-study have already been published in two different papers, but were analysed with a different scope focusing privacy (Linsner et al. 2021) and resilience (Kuntke et al. 2022).

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 https://leafletjs.com

2 https://yunohost.org - self-hosting of (web-)services

3 https://experience.sap.com/skillup/system-usability-scale-jetzt-auch-auf-deutsch/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funds of the German Government's Special Purpose Fund held at Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank in the projects Geobox-II and AgriRegio, and by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the project HyServ [01IS17030B].