In the 20th century, we made tremendous advances in
discovering fundamental principles in different scientific
disciplines that created major breakthroughs in management and
technology for agricultural systems, mostly by empirical means.
However, as we enter the 21st century, agricultural research has
more difficult and complex problems to solve.
The environmental consciousness of the general public is
requiring us to modify farm management to protect water, air,
and soil quality, while staying economically profitable. At the
same time, market-based global competition in agricultural
products is challenging economic viability of the traditional
agricultural systems, and requires the development of new and
dynamic production systems. Fortunately, the new electronic
technologies can provide us a vast amount of real-time
information about crop conditions and near-term weather via
remote sensing by satellites or ground-based instruments and the
Internet, that can be utilized to develop a whole new level of
management. However, we need the means to capture and make
sense of this vast amount of site-specific data.
Our customers, the agricultural producers, are asking for a
quicker transfer of research results in an integrated usable form
for site-specific management. Such a request can only be met
with system models, because system models are indeed the
integration and quantification of current knowledge based on
fundamental principles and laws. Models enhance understanding
of data taken under certain conditions and help extrapolate their
applications to other conditions and locations.
Lajpat R. Ahuja; Liwang Ma; Terry A. Howell. Whole System Integration and Modeling — Essential to
Agricultural Science and Technology in the 21st Century. In: Lajpat R. Ahuja; Liwang Ma; Terry A. Howell
(eds.) Agricultural system models in field research and technology transfer.
Boca Raton, CRC Press LLC, 2002 (adapted).