ABSTRACT
Increasing price variability, rapid inflation, higher interest rates, and closer ties to world supply-and-demand conditions for agricultural commodities have resulted in increased needs for short, intermediate, and long-run marketing information. The agreement was to conduct a pilot study concerning the feasibility of direct electronic delivery of marketing and management information to farm and ranch families. The problem of delivering timely market information in the western United States is compounded by the vast geographical dispersion of producers. AGNET is a time-sharing computer network headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. Feedback from participating county agents and producers during the pilot study resulted in several files being added. One of the developments coming out of this pilot study has been an AGNET Market Information Users Guide. An evaluation form was sent to the producers who were directly accessing the information from their own hardware. The best evaluation of the project lies in the large increase in retrievals of market information.
