Hi members of the DSSAT interest group; This is my first time to address this group so first let me introduce myself. I am a retired Professional Engineer (MIT,USC,UCSD) that has spent 40 years building and applying computer simulation models mostly in the military and industrial areas. About 7 years ago as I was trying to reduce my consulting workload, I became interested in Plant or Crop Simulation. This lead to some research to see who was doing what and some trips to visit some of the most active groups which I had identified. About three years ago on a visit to Hawaii I was introduced to DSSAT 2.1. I was so impressed that I bought it on sight, took it home and began working. I didn t work too hard since I new that Ver. 3.0 was just around the corner. My first attempt to do a simulation introduced me to the task of generating my weather files. Since Ver. 2.1 didn t have Weatherman I programmed my own weatherman so that I could download and properly modify the California weather data available from the system known as CIMIS. When DSSAT 3.0 arrived I was pleased to find an excellent WeatherMan program, and annoyed that I had wasted my time on a not so elegant program to do the same thing. This year I attended the DSSAT3 course presented at the University of Georgia, partly because I wanted to get serious about using DSSAT3 and partly to meet some of the people behind this amazing program. In my opinion the Course was excellent and the people I met were terrific. Now for the purpose of my communication. I AM WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF DSSAT. Some of the things I learned at the DSSAT course was that funding for supporting this system had dried up around 1993 and the updating, bug fixing, and support has been accomplished by a small group of very dedicated people in their spare time. DSSAT is a BIG software system and support and updating is NO SMALL JOB. Until some reliable source of funding can be found it seems to me that the future of DSSAT is in the hands of the DSSAT interest group. The real question is, is there enough interest in the user s to kept DSSAT from dying? I am very much impressed with the DSSAT simulating System. I think a very excellent job has been done in its development, and it represents a very powerful tool, one which should not be allowed to wider away and die. Its continued development has all the promise of efficiently organizing the knowledge we continue gaining about crop growth and development. With the present state of the Personal computer we are not constrained by memory or speed (as modeler s have been during the last 40 years) to include whatever level of complexity we consider important. With DSSAT s continued development it is not difficult to imagine a full fled windows version with a user interface which will make the entire system easy to use. WHO ARE THE USERS? - OR - WHO SHOULD THE USERS BE? As I have pondered this question I can see three groups that should be interested in having such a tool. 1.) Agricultural Consultants, which should include both private and government as in the Agricultural Extension Service. As a private consultant in industry, I visualize the Consultant developing a data base of models representing his clients crops and cropping systems. If DSSAT is not a good enough tool for this vision it can certainly be made to be that tool. He also develops a data base of the clients fields and the field history. Notice that in the case of the private consultant the eventual beneficiary is the farmer who must pay for the service. In the case of the Extension service the eventual beneficiary is the government that has a better farming system, thus the government must pay. This implies that some of the support of the modeling effort should be part of the extension service budget. I include in this group the International Development Centers which I assume are groups of specialized consultants who s main clients are government of major government support agencies. Certainly the development centers for rice and fertilizer have been prime movers in the modeling field. But where is the support from the other development centers? 2.) Agricultural Teachers, which should include those people who are responsible for the learning and training of our future farmers. I cannot visualize a more appropriate tool to help students integrate all of the various disciplines which are required by a farmer. It is also the proper tool to teach the concept of systems, farming systems and ecological systems. It seems to me that in this day and age a student headed for farming of farm extension service should leave school with complete knowledge and confidence in using a DSSAT system. It also seems to me that it will be more effective if all the teachers focus on one system instead of everyone developing their own system which will have the problems of inadequate resources for documentation, support and update. 3.) The big farmers. They are the ones that have a lot to gain by being sure that their operations are run as efficient as possible. I met one of these at the recent course and I gather that he is possibly the first one to check in to see if DSSAT is a suitable tool to help in his management of a rather large acreage in South America. While I think that the above groups will eventually use a DSSAT of some other follow on program, it will take some time for the DSSAT message to be properly developed and delivered. Some people call that selling. Until then those people who are interested in DSSAT will have to figure some way to keep it alive. If we all got together it seems to me that it could be done. If enough of those interested were to volunteer to assume some responsibility say to support a particular part of the program or provide development of some particular feature or new module then some of the load of supporting and moving this software along could be removed from the present leadership. They could then focus on planning and coordinating and selling. Well those are my thoughts at this time and I thought that I would share them in case anyone was interested. I am very enthusiastic about the entire DSSAT program and sincerely hope that some way will be found to keep it moving and developing. I ll certainly volunteer to do what I can which might help the program. While I m very interested to hear what other people think, I m not going to be able to answer any messages during the next week since I ll be in the High Sierra s and without a computer. With lots of enthusiasm Ro Favreau