Farmtopia: democratising digital technologies for small-scale farmers

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Management Engineering and coordinator of the Master of Science in Food Engineering. The agri-food sector is a field I know both from a research and a teaching perspective. Within the Food Engineering programme, I teach a course entitled Agri-Food Supply Chain Perspectives, focused on the management of agri-food supply chains with a view to the sustainability and resilience of food systems.

I am part of a research group within the Department of Management Engineering called the Food Sustainability Lab: a multidisciplinary group that conducts research on sustainable innovations in the agri-food sector. The Smart Agri-Food Observatory also contributed to the Farmtopia project, directly focused on the role of technologies in agriculture. The Politecnico di Milano team is composed of a group of people from the Food Sustainability Lab, including myself, Professor Raffaella Cagliano (Head of the Department of Management Engineering and Principal Investigator of the project), Sandra Cesari de Maria (project manager), Ernst Jan Prosman and Eleonora Catellani, former researcher and PhD student respectively, together with two colleagues from the Smart Agri-Food Observatory: Filippo Renga, one of the scientific directors, and Dana Bonaldi (project management support).

The project was born with the objective of democratising the use of digital technologies in agriculture. The starting point is the recognition that technological innovations exist which can address many of the challenges of contemporary farming — from efficient resource use to pollution reduction — yet these technologies have not yet achieved widespread adoption. If we focus specifically on small-scale farmers, who worldwide account for more than 90% of agricultural businesses, the picture becomes even more complex: economic resources, resistance to change and a lack of skills all come into play.

The scientific literature already documents a range of barriers hindering the adoption of these technologies. Farmtopia sets out precisely to dismantle these barriers and promote the adoption of digital technologies — referred to in the project as ADS, i.e. Advanced Digital Solution — with particular attention to small and medium-sized farming operations.

It refers to the use of various types of digital technologies within farming activities, both in harvesting and monitoring operations. These technologies make it possible to collect large amounts of diverse data, enabling resource-optimisation decisions based not on a few directly observable parameters, but on more complete and articulated information.

A concrete example is irrigation: if data on soil health and the water requirements of a specific crop are available, it becomes possible to irrigate with precisely the amount needed, avoiding waste or shortages that would result from relying on experience and observation alone.

The project includes pilots, called Sustainable Innovation Pilots (SIP), which are small consortia or groups of actors distributed across Europe, engaged in developing a technological innovation and defining business models to support its adoption. There are currently 18 pilot projects: the work started with 9, with which we worked throughout the three years of the project, and a further 9 were added in the final period.

The solutions developed show considerable technological diversity. To give a sense of this: one of the pilots is developing a real-time monitoring system for mushroom growth and yield, using an image recognition system and sensors for collecting environmental data (e.g. temperature, humidity, CO₂); another uses sensors integrated with drones for field mapping and soil analysis; yet another has developed a platform for sharing agricultural machinery among multiple farmers.

The project started in September 2023 and will conclude in September 2026. 

We were involved in co-designing the business models to support the dissemination and adoption of these technologies. We worked with all the participants in the pilot projects to understand what resistance farmers had to adopting each specific solution.

Our work began with gathering the challenges that farmers faced when deciding whether to adopt these technologies. We identified that, across all pilots, the resistance fell mainly into five categories:

The first is financial barriers, linked to an investment perceived as too high and unsustainable.

The second is behavioural barriers, linked to resistance to change and to a strong attachment to traditional ways of working. One aspect that emerged clearly is the difficulty farmers have in evaluating the cost-benefit ratio: costs are explicit, but the benefits of adoption remain uncertain.

The third is technological barriers: the technologies are available, but may present integration difficulties with systems already in use. Related to this is also an infrastructural issue, as these solutions require connectivity and internet access, which are not always available in more remote areas.

The fourth is skills-related barriers: farmers did not feel capable of independently managing these technologies, either in operating them or in carrying out their maintenance.

The fifth is regulatory barriers, linked to regulatory uncertainty. Farmers told us that objectives and funding schemes change too frequently, not allowing sufficient stability to invest.

We did not conduct the co-design phase directly with the farmers, but with the technology providers and the advisors: professionals with a consultancy role supporting farmers. Together with them we designed the solutions; we then assessed feasibility through a survey administered to the 49 farmers involved in the project. This allowed us to identify the most feasible and attractive solutions, as well as those that still encountered resistance.

Once this assessment was complete, we launched a new individual co-design phase with each pilot, discussing the survey results and revising some of the solutions based on the feedback received.

Finally, we worked with the 9 new pilot projects (those that joined in the final year), first verifying whether they shared the same challenges that had emerged previously. They did: they too recognised themselves in the five categories of barriers described, which was an important confirmation. At that point, we presented them with the framework of solutions developed with the first nine, to assess whether they were relevant to their context as well and whether the categories developed would hold for a broader group of pilots.

One significant aspect is that all the solutions we designed are collaborative: they cannot be implemented by the technology provider alone, but require the involvement of multiple actors. Drawing on the scientific literature, we identified three types:

Sharing: peer collaboration based on experience-sharing: an ambassador farmer — who has already adopted the technology — testifies to its benefits to other farmers.

Allocation: collaboration aimed at distributing risks and benefits among different actors. An example is the partnership between farmers and other actors in the supply chain: a company that produces the final product co-invests in the agricultural technology, sharing the risk while also obtaining specific benefits.

Specialization: collaboration between parties with complementary expertise. In our case, this is the collaboration between the farmer (an expert in their own product and field) and the advisor, who has expertise in the local territory and in different crops, or between the farmer and the technology provider (an expert in the technology).

In response to a financial barrier, we co-designed with the pilots solutions based on access to the technology through a subscription model (monthly or annual) or through a pay-per-use model, in which payment is based on the amount of time the technology is used or the number of hectares on which it is deployed.

For resistance linked to difficulty in trusting the technologies and a low perception of their benefits, we proposed the role of so-called ambassador farmers: selected farmers who trial the technology, appreciate its advantages and then act as advocates to others.

Other solutions addressed the issue of investment from a different perspective: the data collected by these technologies could also be useful to other actors in the supply chain — a processing company or a distributor might be interested in accessing them to monitor emissions or trace the product. We therefore envisioned forms of co-investment in which other supply chain actors contribute to purchasing the technology in exchange for specific benefits.

Finally, for skills-related barriers, one of the solutions envisaged involving advisors before the technology is even installed, so as to better calibrate its parameters and support farmers in interpreting the outputs: data which, without support, can be difficult to read and can themselves become a source of resistance.

Among the project’s legacies there are, on the one hand, a library of challenges (which is more of a contextual analysis) and, on the other, a library of solutions, developed, revised and evaluated on the basis of the feedback received. We have sought to formulate solutions that are as generalisable as possible, not tied to individual cases, so that they may be useful beyond the pilots involved.

The other legacy is methodological in nature. By working with the pilots, we effectively developed an approach for designing business models around existing technologies, starting from the barriers to adoption and arriving at concrete solutions. It is not a codified methodology in the strict sense, but it represents an original contribution that could be useful in other contexts as well.

Some of the solutions developed have already been classified as actual, that is, immediately implementable in terms of feasibility and attractiveness. Others are defined as potential: considered attractive, but not yet fully realisable without further steps. The partnership with other actors in the supply chain falls into this second category: it first requires identifying a partner aligned on sustainability objectives, which involves more elaborate processes and timelines.

The real test of the solutions will be their implementation in practice. Direct implementation was not envisaged within the project’s timeframe; the various pilots are moving forward autonomously in this direction.

In the research I conduct on the topic of technologies, I usually deal with aspects related to adoption, engaging with company representatives. This project instead gave me the opportunity to consider the individual dimension: the decision to adopt a technology rests with the individual farmer, who directly manages the business. Moving from speaking with companies to speaking with farmers was very formative.

The other aspect concerns the social dimension of sustainability. The project allowed me to see that yes, environmental objectives can be achieved through digital technologies — from reducing water and soil consumption to cutting greenhouse gas emissions — but this must be done with respect for the real needs, limitations and constraints of farmers. 

Finally, this is a project that allowed me to understand the essential role of agricultural production: it is the stage of the supply chain that works directly with the most critical resources of our planet. Agriculture carries great responsibility, but it is a fragile system that needs to be supported.