Akademia Rolnicza w Szczecinie
Abstract: The searching and processing of information at present time is incon-ceivable without use of information and communication technologies. The paper presents kind and know-how gathered in electronic web pages of Polish institutions. It may be widely use by specialists, scientists and farmers to increase their knowl-edge about processes in agriculture. Insufficient attention and level of direct ex-penses for information processing can call out indirect exex-penses, which reflect losses or lost advantages, due to insufficient, not responsible or not operative infor-mation.
Keywords: Agriculture, Knowledge, Management, Rural Areas, Portal
1. Introduction
Agriculture in Poland is characterized by continous process of ownership, structural and economic changes. A big number of units modified up to size of farm, direction and level of production make complexity and volatility of economic sityation in agriculture. Difficult economic situation of whole rural population has a fundamental influence on those complexity and volatility, as well as a limited demand on food article and their low prices. Those economic elements decide about structure and number of farms, directions of agricultural production, number of people empoyed in that sphere, state of unemployment in rural areas and undertaking non-agricultural activity by farmers [2].
Management of complicated processes in agriculture is important part of specialists’ activ-ity and mostly significant reflect real situation of knowledge.
Any activity undertaken for Polish agriculture is permanent search of alternatives, its es-timation and reception of solutions. Optimal solution can be done on the base of operative, quali-tative, precision and responsible information. Insufficient attention and level of direct expenses for information processing can call out indirect expenses, which reflect losses or lost advan-tages, due to insufficient, not responsible or not operative information.
The main aim of the paper is to present how and what kind of knowledge in world computer net may be used by farmers and rural areas specialists to improve management processes in agri-culture.
2. The main risk factors of agricultural processes
Nowadays it is obvious that the problems with agricultural processes focus on realization of investment projects, which are long-time activities under influence of different factors, and they are attended by the risk of unpredictable of action, event or accident. Losses of investments pro-jects in many cases can be understood as waste of potential possibilities. The arrangement and realization of project take place in specific environment and only right evaluation of it can
al-lowed to expect project's profitability. The purpose of risk management can be defined as percep-tion and exploitapercep-tion of business possibilities, control of risk and avoidance of negative influ-ence.
The activity of agricultural processes, especially production, is specific. The particularity of activity depends not only on internal factors, such as financial situation of farmers but depends on many more like:
- natural and climatic conditions,
- particularity of biological system (plants, animals, birds); - macro economical environment changes;
- rapid development of technologies [3].
Management solution, which allows avoid negative influence, can be taken only on the base of sufficient amount information. The problems of arrangement and realization of agricultural investments projects are connected with information deficit, which can originate from changes of political, economical and legal regulation and rapid development of information and communica-tion technologies.
However, plenty of information cannot guarantee itself good quality of management solu-tion. Information supply is most complicated part and the main function of risk management process.
3. Knowledge about risk management in agriculture
The process of investment project management always closely connected with information processing. From formulation of investment idea, until realization of investment project take place gathering, processing, summarizing and estimating of different information.
The dynamics and complexity of business environment influence on increasing require-ments to investment project management. The information needs of agricultural enterprises are miscellaneous. In process of realization of investment project, the needs of information are changing. It is necessary to pay attention to such fact, that it is impossible to describe precisely the environment changes and future results. As far as realization of investment project takes quite long time and depends on dynamical changes of environment, permanent attendance is needed for it - analysis of results, comparison with planned indexes and with results of similar institu-tions. Managers deal with necessity of making soluinstitu-tions. On the base on information about proc-ess progrproc-ess and environment can be changed not only kind of activity, but and purpose of in-vestment project [4].
At present agricultural institutions in Poland deal with problem of receiving of actual in-formation. Management of investment project required information not only about state and world market, competitors and technologies. Quite important are public and political changes and social development. Important are changes in economical and political situation, payments from European Union’s sources, legal regulation, and taxation system, requirements of environment protection and criteria and direction of state financial support. Also actual information for com-parison reached results with results of other the same activity enterprises.
The information for planning and management of investment projects could be got from various sources. These sources can be grouped into internal and external. The main source of internal information is accounting information system. The main external sources are periodical press, books, television, radio, seminars, exhibitions and others. Internal sources are insufficient
to estimate the business environment situation. One of the newest external information sources - internet suggest large amount of information and more convenient possibilities of its search. The advantage of Internet - possibility of quick search and getting of large amount of information, sometimes could become the deficiency, because review of information take up much time, and it can be difficult to select most actual information. Other deficiency of Internet is difficulties with estimation of reliability of information. Despite the problems with use of information the from world net that importance of this information source in future should increase [5].
Agricultural institutions can obtain more and more information by Internet. For successful development of agricultural sector in Poland, it is necessary to develop information environment - expand information infrastructure, systems for sharing of information and user's abilities to use information and communication technologies.
4. Potential knowledge from Polish official and commercial portals
At present websites becomes most popular kind of Internet service. They contain electronic documents, which can be related throw links, allowing quick and convenient search of informa-tion. However, due to large amount of information, search of it is complex task. At the beginning of 2006, there were about 146000 Internet domain names (www.name.pl) in Poland. According to expert's opinion, it does not reflect real amount of Polish portals, because some part of it are not registered. Knowing correct portal address, user can start search of required information. In a large part of portals of various institutions (enterprises, high schools, ministries), it is possible to find out information not only about institution, but also actual material for visitors and links to other similar pages {Ministry of Agriculture… 2005].
For more complex search, there are used special search systems, for example, www.search.pl, www.google.pl, www.wp.pl and others. They are different in complexity, in sequence and rapidity of search and other parameters. As a result of search user can get a lot of links, viewing which is impossible due to limited time.
The next important thing is that list of topics in different portals is different. The titles of detail topics in different portals are not identical. Therefore, user must know sequence of search links. This sequence in different pages may be different. For agricultural specialists, who don not have enough knowledge and skills for information search, especially for beginners, use of these portals can be too difficult and undesirable [6].
5. Analysis of actual knowledge for agricultural specialists
Creation of portals for agricultural specialists in Poland is on high stage. Such situation could not be surprise-knowing fact, that concept of development of agricultural information sys-tem (AIS) was created at the moment of wide introducing of internet syssys-tem for common use. Large amount of state and social institutions, which deal with agriculture, created their own por-tals and in their databases collected actual for agriculture information. In these pages there are provided a lot of actual information.
On the base of analysis of Polish portals providing information for agricultural specialists, institutions, which created these pages, can be divided into some groups:
1. Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and institutions under Ministry of Agriculture.
3. Universities, Colleges, Research institutes and scholastic institutions. 4. Associations, unions and societies.
5. Institutions providing agricultural and veterinarian services. 6. Institutions financed by EU.
The largest amount of links to other agricultural institutions is putted into portal of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural development [7].
6. Research of possibilities of agricultural institutions to use internet information sources Seeking to establish request and possibilities of rural citizens to use information and com-munication technologies and Internet for information search, it was made a questionnaire in 2005 for specialist of rural areas development and scientists about their use of Internet in their work. In this questionnaire there were provided some personal questions and questions about possibilities, frequency and purposes of Internet use and most popular portals. There were distributed 250 questionnaire forms and received 117 answers. Average age of respondents was 41 years. Educa-tion: not finished secondary - 1%, secondary or higher - 68%, high – 31% respondents. Living place determined: countryside - 30%, parish town - 15%, town - 10%, city - 32% and large city (Szczecin, Koszalin Słupsk) - 13% of respondents.
The results of survey of possibilities of Internet use are shown in figure 1. 26% of respon-dents don not have possibilities to use Internet. The large part of them lives at countryside, vil-lages and towns. Possibilities of Internet use at home and at office also are not very large. Part of rural citizens uses Internet in libraries (12%).
9% 65% 41% 12% 26% 0 0,1 0,2 0,3 0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7 at private cafe
at office at home in library no possibilities Fig. 1. Use of knowledge gained in agricultural portals Source: own studies
Internet rarely use or do not use 25% respondents. The largest part of respondents use Inter-net for e-mail sending - 90%, for search of publications and its reading - 42%, for search of eco-nomical information - 23%, for search of information in databases - 20%, and for search of agri-cultural information - only 19% respondents.
Questionnaired people were asked if they were interested to get actual information about science, studies, consulting news and services in agricultural by Internet. There were 72% of positive answers and 23% - negative answers. For the question if they suppose a special need of any specialized information systems providing information for agricultural specialists and rural citizens, there were 84% positive and only 4% negative answers.
7. Possibilities of changes
Problems of quick and comfortable search of information are actual not only for agricultural specialists in Poland, but also in other European Union states. It must be admitted the right to the opinion that increase of competitiveness is directly connected with use of actual information and quick methods of communication. The amount of agricultural information in Internet is increas-ing rapidly. Large amount of various portals create difficulties for search of required information. To solve this problem there is necessity to develop special agricultural portals, which can help users to find out necessary information.
To improve supply of agricultural specialist with actual information, Polish Ministry of Ag-riculture and Rural Development created a professional site that helps quickly find all necessary information.
The main task of it is to provide information for agricultural specialists and scientists about programs, projects and works of scientific research, demonstration tests, publications, links to agricultural specialists and useful databases in Poland, other countries and autonomy institutions. One of subsystems contains the links to actual for agricultural specialists portals and short distri-bution of provided information.
8. Conclusions
Nowadays it seems that increasing of competitive ability of agricultural institutions and de-creasing of problems in agriculture processes is unimaginable without better supply of specialists with information and use of information and communication technologies without possibilities and capability of agricultural institutions to use increasing information stream. The universal search system, which allows finding out necessary information by keywords in portals of Polish agricultural institutions is well developed. There are a lot of information about all branches of polish agriculture, starting from methods of production, up to direct payments from EU sources. Agricultural specialists understand necessity of specialized information portals, adopted for their needs but cannot properly estimate the advantages of this source due to insufficient possibilities of Internet use.
Seeking to create favorable conditions for agricultural specialists to make quick and com-fortable search of information for investments projects management, it is necessary not only develop information infrastructure, formation needs and abilities of end-users to use information and communication technologies, but also more develop specialized portals for sharing of infor-mation. The most necessary information and the whole modern knowledge about processes in Polish agriculture is gathered in Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development portal. It may be considered the best example of Internet portal for agricultural specialists and rural areas citizens.
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BARTOSZ MICKIEWICZ Akademia Rolnicza w Szczecinie ul. ołnierska 47
