Digital Agriculture Strategy

The aim of this chapter is to examine strategies for digitalizing agriculture. The first part of the chapter examines strategies for digitalizing agriculture in Africa. This part begins with an analysis of the role of agriculture in Africa, and it attempts to answer the question of whether African can feed itself and the world through its own agriculture. The first part will also consider strategies for innovating and computerizing Africa's agriculture. The second part of the chapter will examine agricultural trends and strategies in the European Union. This part will focus specifically on the trends of digital-oriented and smart farm developments. The final part of the chapter will consider strategies for digitalizing agriculture in Latin America and Asia.

Communicating the Benefits and Risks of Digital Agriculture Technologies: Perspectives on the Future of Digital Agricultural Education and Training

British Columbia’s food system is experiencing an emerging trend in the digitalization of agriculture, which will impact agricultural practices in the province. The rapid growth of this field has created a niche for training and education in digital agriculture and more specifically, in areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and computing. However, it remains unclear whether current educators and trainers in British Columbia are communicating both the benefits and risks of digital agriculture, and the need for an inclusive and equitable approach to digital agriculture. To understand the emerging education and training landscape in digital agricultural technologies, this exploratory study engaged in a key informant interview with 12 participants, including educators, relevant government staff, and private training consultants/practitioners in the food and agricultural sector in British Columbia. The small sample is reflective of the nascent nature of this area of research, which seeks to better understand digital agriculture from the perspectives of agricultural educators and trainers both in the public and private sectors. The study found that there is currently a lack of consideration for equity and food sovereignty in digital agricultural training and education. This is primarily due to a gap in engagement with the social aspects of digital agriculture. Without engaging critical social scientists and critical data studies, digital agriculture education, and training may be conducted in ways that do not promote responsible and ethical innovation, and are therefore counterproductive to the development of a just and sustainable food system.

Transformation of Personnel Training for Rural Economy

Currently, a modern young specialist is expected to meet the market forming criteria for the selection in the agricultural labor market and have a risk-oriented thinking. It is necessary to upd ate the structure of the development of an effective mechanism for the training of highly qualified personnel on the basis of specialized universities in the region. The relevance of the topic of the study is explained by the fact that the agricultural labor market is experiencing a shortage of young highly qualified IT specialists in digital agriculture. This article raises the problem of personnel training that meets the modern requirements of dynamically developing agriculture in the conditions of digitalization of the country in the post-pandemic period. The purpose of the study is to analyze the tasks facing an agricultural university in training of young specialists for agriculture as a branch of the digital economy of Russia. The objectives of the article are to develop a model for partnerships and promotion of employment of young specialists in the post-pandemic economy in order to develop optimal variants for covering personnel deficit in the agriculture; to suggest measures on the regulation of the labor market for young specialists. The solution of the tasks se t in the article will allow training highly qualified young specialists with all the necessary competencies and capable of meeting the requirements of the modern agricultural labor market. The article discusses the concepts, the departmental program “Digital Agriculture”, the areas of training and additional training of young specialists in the agriculture. The implementation of modern goals facing agricultural universities will improve the algorithm for training highly qualified young specialists who would be able to meet all the selection criteria in the agricultural labor market.

Digital agriculture for small-scale producers

Smart Farming with technologies such as IoT, computer vision, and AI can improve agricultural efficiency, transparency, profitability, and equity for farmers in low-and middle-income countries.

A Bibliometric Network Analysis of Recent Publications on Digital Agriculture to Depict Strategic Themes and Evolution Structure

The agriculture sector is one of the backbones of many countries’ economies. Its processes have been changing to enable technology adoption to increase productivity, quality, and sustainable development. In this research, we present a scientific mapping of the adoption of precision techniques and breakthrough technologies in agriculture, so-called Digital Agriculture. To do this, we used 4694 documents from the Web of Science database to perform a Bibliometric Performance and Network Analysis of the literature using SciMAT software with the support of the PICOC protocol. Our findings presented 22 strategic themes related to Digital Agriculture, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Climate-smart Agriculture (CSA), among others. The thematic network structure of the nine most important clusters (motor themes) was presented and an in-depth discussion was performed. The thematic evolution map provides a broad perspective of how the field has evolved over time from 1994 to 2020. In addition, our results discuss the main challenges and opportunities for research and practice in the field of study. Our findings provide a comprehensive overview of the main themes related to Digital Agriculture. These results show the main subjects analyzed on this topic and provide a basis for insights for future research.

Digital Agriculture Infrastructure in the USA and Germany

The USA and Germany have compared the issues that surround the adoption of digital technology on the farm that will foster more environmentally sustainable food production/processing systems. Both countries lack robust broadband internet pathways to foster the adoption of these technologies. The problem is currently relevant to making this data technology available on every farm and field. The implementation of this infrastructure is even more important as society demands more and more information on the product and production process of agriculture and industry.