Research dealing with the adoption of various precision agriculture technologies has shown that guidance and recording tools are more widespread than reactive ones (such as variable rate technology), with much lower utilization rates in European case studies. This study aims to analyze the propensity to innovate variable rate technologies among young Italian farmers. A cluster analysis was carried out revealing four groups. The first two groups represent non-adopters who think technological innovation is very complex from a technical point of view, as well as not very accessible as capital-intensive technology. The third and fourth groups represent adopters. The third reports an early level of adoption, still considering the cost of access a major barrier to technology implementation. The fourth, on the other hand, shows a more intensive level and considers the lack of institutional support a major limitation. The cluster with the most intensive adoption is characterized by the youngest age group, the farms with the largest size, and a prevalence of female entrepreneurs. The need for management training in day-to-day business operations upon adoption is detected for all groups. This paper identified relevant drivers and barriers in characterizing the adopting farm of variable rate technologies. Results may offer insights to the policy maker to better calibrate support interventions.

Italy is among the most important countries in Europe for milk production. The new European policies encourage a transition towards sustainability and are leading European dairy farms to follow new trajectories to increase their economic efficiency, reduce their environmental impact, and ensure social sustainability. Few studies have attempted to classify dairy farms by analyzing the relationships between the structural profiles of farms and the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability. This work intends to pursue this aim through an exploratory analysis in the Italian production context. The cluster analysis technique made it possible to identify three types of dairy farms, which were characterized on the basis of indicators that represented the three dimensions of sustainability (environmental, social, and economic sustainability) and the emerging structural relationships based on the structural characteristics of the dairy farms. The classification made it possible to describe the state of the art of the Italian dairy sector in terms of sustainability and to understand how different types of farms can respond to the new European trajectories.

This paper offers an overview of circular economy strategies applied to the aquaculture sector. The growing challenges imposed on the sector by the strategies of the Green Deal impose new growth strategies in the name of sustainability. The scalability of these strategies is increasingly hampered by regulatory voids and by the absence of a universally accepted assessment method for measuring the impacts of current aquaculture systems. More than ever, a review of knowledge in the circular economy field is required to comprehend where the aquaculture sector is heading, and in order to make the required transition. The present review proposes a bibliometric analysis, a network analysis and a content analysis, which highlight a very new and expanding field of research. The studies were firstly analyzed from a micro (animal metabolism) to a macro perspective (policies, markets and society), emphasizing where research is still lacking. Furthermore, a second level of classification concerns the type of circularity approach proposed for the aquaculture system, which can be divided into open-loop or closed-loop strategies. Regarding the open-loop-related studies, the focus of the evaluation is devoted to the different bioeconomic values of the circularity strategies proposed for the biological flows entering and exiting the aquaculture system. The literature review offered insights into the identification of research threads that are developing around the aquaculture sector.

The digital transition toward sustainable food systems is a key challenge, boosted by recent policy initiatives to build up digitalized and sustainable business models at farm and territorial levels, which may address new opportunities for alternative food systems. The paper presents the results of an anticipation exercise whose purpose is to identify the value-generating potential of digital platforms for short food supply chains and compatibility issues. The starting point was a theoretical distinction of value into primary and secondary values, where the first is absorbed by supply chain actors, and the second goes beyond supply chain boundaries in the form of social, environmental, ethical, and cultural benefits. In the empirical analysis of the study, the awareness–knowledge–adoption–product sequence was instrumental in investigating the potential adoption of the two different digital solutions and assessing their effectiveness in terms of expected benefits. For the analysis, data were drawn from a sample of farmers who distribute their products through short food supply chains in Italy. Results reveal that digital innovations represent socio-technical phenomena whose value-generating capacity is socially context-dependent and that, beyond their function as marketplaces or information-storing devices, these platforms can help pursue sustainability-related goals.

Summary: Although research and political intentions both recognise the crucial role of small farms in Rural Development (RD) strategies, in actual practice they are left out of the benefits of agricultural policies. This is not established by legislative or regulatory prescriptions. It is the result of consolidated practices driven by the productivist approach to agricultural development, overtaken by the concept of multifunctionality, which has inspired European intervention in the agricultural sector and rural areas for more than twenty years. This is particularly evident in Italy, where the weight of small farms is extremely significant in terms of numbers, farmland area and work generated. The continuity of small farms in Italy is of fundamental importance due to their economic, environmental and social relevance to the objective of reconnecting agriculture and territories in a circular vision of RD. Despite this crucial role, these farms have historically had great difficulty accessing RD programmes due to the national or regional implementation of these plans, which set access thresholds and procedural constraints that effectively exclude small farmers. The construction of a national strategy for rural areas requires specific attention to the universe of small farms, which should be included within the perimeter of the potential beneficiaries of RD policies.