Smart Farming Technology Trends: Economic and Environmental Effects, Labor Impact, and Adoption Readiness

Athanasios T Balafoutis,Frits K Van Evert,Spyros Fountas

doi:10.3390/agronomy10050743

Abstract

Farming faces challenges that increase the adverse effects on farms’ economics, labor, and the environment. Smart farming technologies (SFTs) are expected to assist in reverting this situation. In this work, 1064 SFTs were derived from scientific papers, research projects, and industrial products. They were classified by technology readiness level (TRL), typology, and field operation, and they were assessed for their economic, environmental, and labor impact, as well as their adoption readiness from end-users. It was shown that scientific articles dealt with SFTs of lower TRL than research projects. In scientific articles, researchers investigated mostly recording technologies, while, in research projects, they focused primarily on farm management information systems and robotic/automation systems. Scouting technologies were the main SFT type in scientific papers and research projects, but variable rate application technologies were mostly located in commercial products. In scientific papers, there was limited analysis of economic, environmental, and labor impact of the SFTs under investigation, while, in research projects, these impacts were studied thoroughly. Further, in commercial SFTs, the focus was on economic impact and less on labor and environmental issues. With respect to adoption readiness, it was found that all of the factors to facilitate SFT adoption became more positive moving from SFTs in scientific papers to fully functional commercial SFTs, indicating that SFTs reach the market when most of these factors are addressed for the benefit of the farmers. This SFT analysis is expected to inform researchers on adapting their research, as well as help policy-makers adjust their strategy toward digitized agriculture adoption and farmers with the current situation and future trends of SFTs.

Highlights

Agricultural performance in terms of productivity led farming practices after the Green Revolution of the 1950s, with limited attention paid to the respective impact on sustainability
The number of articles describing an smart farming technologies (SFTs) is growing rapidly (Figure 1), showing the trend of research to transfer conventional agriculture based on the Green Revolution concept to a modern smart agriculture (ICT interference in agricultural machinery for increased precision and specified input application)
13,251 scientific papers were found in the citation database Scopus with the query described in Section 2.2, and the manual selection resulted in a small fraction of these scientific papers

Summary

Introduction

Agricultural performance in terms of productivity led farming practices after the Green Revolution of the 1950s, with limited attention paid to the respective impact on sustainability. Once gathered, processed, and analyzed, these data can assist in determining the state of the agro-environment (e.g., soil, crop, and climate) and, when combined with agro-climatic and economic models, technical interventions can be applied at the field level by either conventional means or automated/robotized solutions [11]. All these aspects are under the concept named “smart farming” that represents the application of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) into agriculture [12,13,14]. These include variable rate applicators [15,16,17], Internet of things (IoT) [18,19], geo-positioning systems [20,21], big data [22,23,24], unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones) [18,25], automated systems, and robotics [26,27]

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Conclusion