Electronic Database of the State and Functioning of Agricultural Landscapes

The article explores the issues of increasing economic efficiency of crop production on the basis of information technologies. In terms of methodology, the paper relies on the system analysis that allows studying properties and structure of an object as a system consisting of subsystems, components, ele? ments and ties between them with the aim to support managerial decision-making in crop production. The main methods used in the research include methods of structural, morphological and cognitive analysis. Based on the data of the Kurgan Research Institute of Agriculture (branch of the Ural Federal Agrarian Scientific Research Centre), the authors created an information database of fields, which in par? ticular involved developing the structure of cropping history database and creating a programme for re? cording any type of agronomical information about the state and functioning of agricultural landscapes year by year. The authors used a relational model for the data stored in SQL server. Having calculated the technological maps for every field the researchers examined economic efficiency of agricultural tech? nologies. As a result, they reveal significant differences in productivity of spring and winter wheat and the cost of the resulting grain and specify factors behind the economic results. Agronomical information recorded in the developed database helps identify the most efficient agricultural technologies allowing for the specifics of the cropping history in each field.