How do livestock farmers choose and use information to manage their farms? Some proposals for advisors

Abstract

To help with renewing interventions of advisors in farm management, interviews were carried out three times over one year among beef cattle farmers to analyse their ways of sorting and using information to manage their farms. Based on the data interviews, a framework was built to represent the farmers' information systems. This framework integrates the way farmers make sense of i) the situations they have to manage and ii) the information they use. It is composed of three key-elements describing those situations: the dimensions of livestock farming (e.g., feeding, reproduction, sales, etc.), the events detected by farmers and which are considered as problems, the information they acquire and use to face the problems. The farmer's understanding regarding both the situation and the information depends on several criteria: i) his perception of the events, ii) his sensitivity to the mastering of each dimension of livestock farming, iii) his assessment of the usefulness and usability of the information. Some proposals for using this framework and these criteria for and with the advisers to renew their methods are discussed.