Handbook Digital Farming

This chapter describes a motivation for this book, as well as the current challenges, requirements and targets in the agricultural ecosystem when it comes to digital transformation. It begins with a farmer’s perspective and moves through sustainability and environmental perspectives to a description of the state of the practice in the adoption and acceptance of Digital Farming technologies. It provides key requirements and open issues to be addressed when developing or using Digital Farming technologies. Finally, it provides insights how policy makers see the topic of Digital Farming and how the current status of agricultural digital and data law gives a frame for Digital Farming technologies.

This chapter presents methods, tools, and approaches on the transformation process itself and its enablement. It starts with a view on the history of Digital Farming technology and a first view on a potential future roadmap. Then it presents major (macroeconomic) trends that are impacting the current digital agricultural ecosystem and possibilities to make an economic benefit quantification on a farm level. This is followed by a French perspective how Digital Farming tools can be successfully disseminated. A model and approach for business model innovation with a concrete example application in agriculture is outlined. This chapter ends with an experience report on accelerators and partnerships in the agricultural domain. It describes why establishing successful business models is hard and states how to adopt innovative Digital Farming programs to better prepare for the new challenges ahead.

This chapter starts with a perspective on how the efficient system engineering for automation and autonomous machines will change in the future into the direction of highly automated, flexible equipment systems. It explains various Precision Farming technologies and application scenarios. Further, it highlights the current state of the art and specific challenges of safe object detection and how such systems can be engineered. To address interoperability for Digital Farming solutions, a reference architecture on how to achieve better interoperability is presented. The use of AI in agriculture is outlined by sketching technology and key application scenarios. A view on data sharing in agriculture and relevant technologies such as ontologies and terminologies for describing the data is given. We highlight the role of geo-based data and its farm-specific integration. In the end, a comprehensive outlook on technology developments in various technological areas is provided.

The agronomy chapter follows the agricultural core processes and major tasks. Starting with a strategic perspective on agricultural solutions, followed by an overview of todays new purchasing channels for agricultural inputs. Next are the crop management tasks, incl. soil preparation and seeding, crop nutrition and crop protection. Towards the end of the chapter harvesting, marketing, sales, and the handover to food chain is closing the overall farm process. This chapter appreciates farming requires many different technologies and competencies, today all on very high efficiency and effectiveness level. The reader of the book gets an idea of the requirements digital products need to meet in making such process even more effective.

The agricultural production system chapter appreciates the crop type specific perspectives. While the base farm process has the same key steps (see chapter 4), the crop specific details and differences are in scope of this chapter. This chapter appreciates the key crops have very specific requirements to be considered. The reader of the book gets an idea what requirements to consider when developing a crop specific solution. The production systems incl. different crops like cereals, fruits, vegetables and grapes as well as livestock and dairy. From a country perspective insights are provided specifically for UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

As shared in chapter one, there are multiple existing and new requirements in a more sustainable agricultural production system, e.g. laid down in regulations, defined in company strategies, purchasing policies and consumer preferences. Compared to the recent decades, which focused on solving specific issues (e.g., ground water quality, flowering strips for insects), todays sustainability challenges seem to call for more systemic, interdisciplinary, integrated, new solutions (e.g. climate change, biodiversity). This chapter provides examples and focus points where to start improving the agricultural sustainability. It describes organizational, methodological, agronomical and other specific approaches how to transform a farm, a segment and the whole value chain.

In this book, renowned experts gave us their views on the digital transformation of the agricultural sector from various perspectives. In the following, we summarize the most important insights into the current state of practice and the state of the art that we have gained from each chapter.