Specificity

Excerpt

THE information required for specific decision-making processes in agriculture is requested by a variety of clientele, including congressional committees, environmental groups, and private industry representatives, as well as individual agricultural producers. The information requested should provide the client with a probability of success (usually economic) of performing a given management practice, such as crop variety selection, fertilization, irrigation scheduling, or weed control, or in formulating resource management policies, such as soil conservation, commodity price supports, or regulation.

Decisions in production agriculture require information concerning the most effective farming operations, as well as the most efficient allocation of resources. Socioeconomic and political changes beyond the control of the individual producer further complicate the decision-making process (2). Therefore, information required to make sound management decisions comes from many diverse sources.

In the context of agricultural management systems, we define specificity as the level of informational detail required for the most appropriate management decisions. The level of specificity in a given recommendation depends on the person using the information and changes with the user's changing values.

Knowing that our research data from a variety trial, a nitrogen response experiment, or a herbicide screening test will reach many audiences, we …