Printed in the United States of America Copyright 1997 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. The land grant university system and the Agricultural Research Service have been enormously successful at creating and transferring a knowledge base to lo- cal farming communities for production of large quantities of crops at low cost. Recently, external influences such as global trade, environmental concerns, and consumer preferences have been creating new pressures for the agricultural in- dustry. The need to accommodate production and marketing changes has put our agricultural research institutions in a new and unfamiliar setting.
Information technologies can facilitate a response to market and societal pres- sures.
Techniques are available for making precise measurements and continuously updating field conditions. Even more importantly, information that is adequate today may be insufficient to meet tomorrow's needs of producers, agri- business managers, and society. Our universities and laboratories will need to radically alter their approaches to accommodate this information overflow. What are the environmental, economic, and social implications of preci . The committee adopted an approach that could accommodate numerous aspects of crop management that are interrelated and vary in time and space.