Opportunities in Farm Management: Discussion/Challenge

Abstract

The role of cognitive science as presented by Black offers an in-depth treatment of the current agricultural information processing and interpretation revolution and the contributions of other disciplines, ranging from engineering and psychology, finance and medicine, to the science of decisionmaking in agriculture. Certainly, many farm management economists will find the issues of information reception, styles of thinking, systems science approaches, biological pathways in modeling, psychological types, and other cognitive science issues raised in this session to be important and useful in the context of both basic and applied research. Agricultural economists are again reminded of the need to integrate approaches across models, the payoff to alternative degrees of approximating reality and the usefulness of a better balance in the portfolio of microcomputer activities.