**7. Conclusion**

More than 30 computerized decision support system tools have been developed to assist dairy farmers in their continuous decision-making needs. All these tools are openly avail‐ able at http://DairyMGT.info under the *Tools* section. Tools are grouped in major manage‐ ment areas of dairy farming such as feeding and nutrition, reproductive efficiency, heifer management and replacement, production and productivity, price risk management and financial assessment, and environmental stewardship. A number of methodologies and combinations of methodologies as well as different software applications were used to de‐ velop these decision support systems with the ultimate goal to always provide solid, but still user-friendly management tools for dairy practical farm decision-making. Methodolo‐ gies included partial budgeting, cost benefit, decision analysis, enterprise budgets, linear programming, Markov chains, mathematical simulation and projection, nonlinear optimi‐ zation, matrix solution, database management, and use of external simulation models. Software used to develop the tools included Macromedia Flash, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, C, CSS, MySQL, Spreadsheet applications, and executable programs. The DSS have pro‐ ven to be effective decision-making tools for improved dairy farming operation. Large dissemination and impact of these DSS tools can be verified by having 9,336 downloads of these DSS tools during the one-year period between May 2011 and April 2012 and the request of 168 talks with 6,500 people in attendance across the world during the 4-year period between May 2008 and April 2012.
