Design Thinking and Compliance as Drivers for Decision Support System Adoption in Agriculture

To respond to increasing demands for good agricultural practices (GAP) and food safety, governments globally are introducing stringent regulations to govern agricultural compliance that affect production, storage, and sales activities. New legislation in Argentina to enforce GAP is an opportunity to test compliance as an incentive to adopt technological solutions. This research aims to determine whether compliance software is an effective gateway to shift farmers’ decision-making strategies from intuition-based to evidence-based, improving agricultural productivity through technology. Integrating technology can be a significant hurdle for farms but is also a steppingstone towards more reliable processes. To address this, the authors prototype a decision support system (DSS) for greenhouse farmers in La Plata, Argentina, to help farmers keep traceable records of their crops and treatments to reduce compliance risk. The project incorporates lessons learned from previous DSS projects and utilises design-thinking strategies to involve the end-user in the development.