In 1980, Hershey Brothers Dairy milked 60 cows. Today, brothers Dale, Steve, and Clair Hershey milk about 200 cows on their fifth-generation, 400-acre farm in Lancaster County. In addition to growing corn, alfalfa, and other crops for animal feed, they also raise their own replacement stock and custom-raise heifers for several other farmers. Steve Hershey says computers made it possible to take the farm to a higher management level. "By retrieving and analyzing herd records for breeding, health, and production decisions, we've been able to integrate our operation and become more efficient," he explains. "We only have to enter record-keeping information once, rather than write it down several times in several places. In our business, we need to make decisions quickly. With our records on the computer, we don't have to wait a week for milk test results. If a milk tester comes on Wednesday, I can download the results from the Dairy Herd Improvement Association's computer to my computer on Friday morning, then make decisions based on that data. We even use computers to write checks–our software prints the names and addresses on the envelopes. We never waste time looking up addresses that we use over and over again."

Computers can help farmers keep records, analyze their business, and comply with regulations. Combined with other electronic devices, they can even generate detailed maps of crop yields and soil conditions.

It's nearly impossible to find businesses without computers these days. More and more farm operations are relying on them. According to the Association of Agricultural Computing Companies, about 250,000 U.S. farmers use computers. In a 1996 Penn State survey of Pennsylvania farmers, almost one-third of the respondents reported using them for farm management tasks. Producers seem to have a growing interest in how computers can boost their bottom line and help them take care of business. Nearly 260 Pennsylvania farmers attended the first Agricultural Computing and Electronics (ACE) exposition, held last December in Lancaster County. The response to the event, which was sponsored by Penn State Cooperative Extension, Pennsylvania Farmer magazine, Nutrient Solutions in Agriculture, and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, was so enthusiastic that another ACE expo has been planned for 1997. "Today's tough economic climate requires informed decision-making, and while computers can't solve all the problems farmers face, they can help producers analyze the large amount of data they must consider," says Laura Watts, extension agent in Cumberland County, who presented a session at the expo introducing farmers to the basics of computer technology. "When used properly, computers can help farmers keep accurate records, understand where their business is going, communicate with other farmers and specialists, and even manage their fields and livestock with more precision."

Many Pennsylvania farmers use Penn State's computer-based crop information management system (CIMS), which integrates crop, nutrient, and pest-management information. In 1990, 65 Pennsylvania farmers used the CIMS to help them manage data on 2,000 fields totaling 10,000 acres. Today, more than 250 farmers, many of them members of local crop management associations, use the system to manage data on more than 8,600 fields totaling some 43,000 acres. "Farmers using the CIMS record crop data on standardized forms using standardized terminology," says Janis Pruss, Penn State's crop management program manager, who developed the CIMS. "Once this information is entered into a computer database, the system generates detailed, field-specific reports identifying cash flow requirements and summarizing crop, nutrient, and pest management practices. This system is especially useful for farms that rotate crops across many small fields, where documenting management practices and yields can be tedious and complicated." A single field record can contain nearly 1,500 pieces of information, so a farm with 35 fields may have 50,000 entries stored for each growing season. Computers can quickly analyze that volume of information to help growers make better decisions, says Pruss, who recently adapted the CIMS for use by Iowa farmers and continues to add new components to it. "Computers don't save time, but they enable farmers to get more out of the time they invest by crunching numbers more quickly and summarizing data in many ways."

Once, farm managers had to know only whether their total operation was making money. "Today, they still need to know what's happening to the whole farm, but they also must understand all of the individual enterprises that make up the business," says agricultural economist Larry Jenkins, who conducts two-day workshops to help farmers use computers for record keeping and accounting. "Is it the cows or the corn, the sows or the soybeans that are making money? Computers make it easier to determine which parts of a farm are profitable." Farm managers who use computers for record keeping can include a detailed business analysis in their accounting activities by giving an enterprise name to each product–alfalfa, corn, soybeans, dairy, beef, hogs, and anything else produced on the farm. When transactions are entered in the computer, each is assigned to the appropriate enterprise. "For example, a feed purchase might be charged to the dairy enterprise," says Jenkins. "By assigning all transactions, farmers can develop reports that track income and expenses for each enterprise with only a slight increase in time and effort. The reports make the profitability of each enterprise apparent."