The role of ICT for Future Agriculture and the role of Agriculture for Future ICT

At the start of the 21st Century we are faced with the emerging problem of global food demand and exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity with the current way of agricultural production. Moreover, the issues of safety, health, quality and sustainability, underpinned by  the concept of transparency, have become increasingly important. In many global discussions forums it has been acknowledged that ICT can and will play an important role in meeting these challenges.
Over the past thirty years ICT technologies have been introduced in the agri-food sectors. Important milestones were introduction of computers (1980s), internet, email and mobile phones (1990s), and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), wireless communication and social media (last decade). Modern farms make use of one or more of the following ICT: computers with a farm management system to keep track inputs, outputs and economics, weather forecast, early warning and decision support systems for crop management, auto guidance systems for controlled traffic on fields, tractor mounted board computers for steering of sprayers and other machines in a preferred way, and data registration systems to meet legal and chain requirements.
However, the uptake of these solutions has been slow due to a number of important yet  unresolved issues. For instance, farmers register a large amount of data. The use of this data is still limited because handling is still far from easy in optimization of crop, farm and  chain management. Problems are related with limited standardization, data protection and lack of optimizatin models. There’s still a large potential in stimulating adoption of current  ICT, but future ICT technologies even promise more potential gains. At the same time, it is  believed that the agri-food sector itself can also play an important role in the development of  future ICT. Read more