Agriculture has seen many revolutions, whether the domestication of animals and plants a few thousand years ago, the systematic use of crop rotations and other improvements in farming practice a few hundred years ago, or the “green revolution” with systematic breeding and the widespread use of man-made fertilizers and pesticides a few decades ago. We suggest that agriculture is undergoing a fourth revolution triggered by the exponentially increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT) in agriculture. New technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles with powerful, lightweight cameras, allow for improved farm management advice. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Kleir. Autonomous, robotic vehicles have been developed for farming purposes, such as mechanical weeding, application of fertilizer, or harvesting of fruits. The development of unmanned aerial vehicles with autonomous flight control (1), together with the development of lightweight and powerful hyperspectral snapshot cameras that can be used to calculate biomass development and fertilization status of crops (2, 3), opens the field for sophisticated farm management advice. Moreover, decision-tree models are available now that allow farmers to differentiate between plant diseases based on optical information (4). Virtual fence technologies (5) allow cattle herd management based on remote-sensing signals and sensors or actuators attached to the livestock. Taken together, these technical improvements constitute a technical revolution that will generate disruptive changes in agricultural practices. This trend holds for farming not only in developed countries but also in developing countries, where deployments in ICT (e.g., use of mobile phones, access to the Internet) are being adopted at a rapid pace and could become the game-changers in the future (e.g., in the form of seasonal drought forecasts, climate-smart agriculture). Such profound changes in practice come not only with opportunities but also big challenges. It is crucial to point them out at an early stage of this …

Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous entity. Through targeted use of inputs, precision farming reduces waste, thereby cutting both private variable costs and the environmental costs such as those of agrichemical residuals. At present, large farms in developed countries are the main adopters of precision farming. But its potential environmental benefits can justify greater public and private sector incentives to encourage adoption, including in small-scale farming systems in developing countries. Technological developments and big data advances continue to make precision farming tools more connected, accurate, efficient, and widely applicable. Improvements in the technical infrastructure and the legal framework can expand access to precision farming and thereby its overall societal benefits.

Understanding the drivers of yield levels under climate change is required to support adaptation planning and respond to changing production risks. This study uses an ensemble of crop models applied on a spatial grid to quantify the contributions of various climatic drivers to past yield variability in grain maize and winter wheat of European cropping systems (1984–2009) and drivers of climate change impacts to 2050. Results reveal that for the current genotypes and mix of irrigated and rainfed production, climate change would lead to yield losses for grain maize and gains for winter wheat. Across Europe, on average heat stress does not increase for either crop in rainfed systems, while drought stress intensifies for maize only. In low-yielding years, drought stress persists as the main driver of losses for both crops, with elevated CO₂ offering no yield benefit in these years.

Digitalisation is rapidly transforming the agri-food sector. This paper investigates emerging opportunities, challenges and policy options. We show that digital innovations can contribute to more sustainable and resilient agricultural systems. For example, digital innovations enable increased productivity, reduced environmental footprints and higher resilience of farms. However, these optimistic outcomes of increasing digitalisation of the agricultural sector will not emerge on their own, but this development comes with several challenges, costs and risks, e.g. in economic, social and ethical dimensions. We provide policy recommendations to explore opportunities and avoid risks. Moreover, we discuss implications for future research in agricultural economics.