Högskolan i Skövde

Agriculture is facing immense challenges and ecological intensification has been presented as a way forward where precision agriculture (PA) plays an important role. A more sustainable agriculture needs farmers that embrace situated expertise and who can handle changing farming systems. Many agricultural decision support systems (AgriDSS) have been developed to support farm management, but the traditional approach to AgriDSS development is mostly based on the knowledge transfer perspective. This has resulted in technology being considered as an isolated phenomenon and thus not adapted to farmers’ actual needs or their decision-making in practice. The aim of this study was to improve the understanding of farmers’ use of AgriDSS in relation to their situated expertise and how they cared for their fields. The theoretical framework of distributed cognition (DCog) was used as a lense when investigating and analyzing farmers' use of a software tool called CopSAT developed for calculation of variable rate application (VRA) files for nitrogen (N) fertilization from satellite images. The results revealed that CropSAT could function as a tool which supported decision making and the development of situated expertise, highlighting the care perspective.