Sustainable management of Serbian agricultural family holdings

Abstract

The devastating impact tangibly felt by the entire humanity due to COVID-19 should not be a surprise since pandemics such as Spain flu, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Zika, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Ebola are becoming regular assurances (Oruma et al., 2021). Pandemics such as these are something that might be expected in the future as well, and as such are a threat for which human kind must be prepared in the future (Kumari et al., 2021; Pulighe & Lupia, 2020; Workie et al., 2020). This is additionally becoming true and evident within supply chains of farming products, including food processing and storing, distribution and logistics, which are already suffer from very low efficiency and effectiveness, sensitivity to market disruptions and other external factors (Lezoche et al., 2020). Sustainable management of agricultural family holdings (AFH) is in comparison to agricultural holdings held by big corporations, even more under threat. This is especially true in countries with less developed agricultural infrastructure, such as the Republic of Serbia. Agricultural production is not rationally organized, and labor productivity is low. Some of the problems identified within AFHs include: inability to respond to climate change challenges; lack of the data and records on their business activity; lack of the data and records on their natural, human and material resources; resource management; inability to respond to the disruption of distribution chain; lack of decision support systems and business monitoring and planning tools. Consequently, the paper aims to examine requirements of AFHs related to business information and to propose information system (IS) characteristics able to improve the system management. The IS proposal will be based on spreadsheet applications due to the price, availability, flexibility, ease and speed of the system development and modifications. Proposed solution should support sustainable management of AFHs in the Republic of Serbia.