Smart Agricultural Technology (Oct 2023)

Precision farming technologies on crop protection: A stakeholders survey

  • Evangelos Anastasiou,
  • Spyros Fountas,
  • Michael Koutsiaras,
  • Matina Voulgaraki,
  • Anna Vatsanidou,
  • Jesus Barreiro-Hurle,
  • Fabiola Di Bartolo,
  • Manuel Gómez-Barbero

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5
p. 100293

Abstract

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Although precision farming technologies (PFTs) have the ability to reduce the use of pesticides, delivering on this potential relies on the adoption of PFTs by the farming community. With small and medium-sized farmers representing more than 95% of the total number of farmers while cultivating less than 30% of the total cultivated area globally, and presenting a low adoption rate of PFTs, their adoption of PFTs becomes key to understand the global potential of these technologies. In this paper we report an expert knowledge elicitation of the main aspects of PFTs adoption by small and medium-sized farmers covering the perceived usefulness for their farms, the main barriers for adoption and the role of agricultural institutions and policies in overcoming these. Data were obtained via an online survey which was answered by 175 agricultural experts from around the globe. From the analysis of the responses, we can conclude that the usefulness of PFTs are crop and technology specific. Nearly all respondents considered the lack of technical support to be the most important limiting factor for the adoption of PFTs and identified farmers who are already adopters of PFTs and farmer cooperatives as the most promising agents for disseminating this support and increasing adoption by other farmers. Provision of incentives to lower investment costs together with advisory services were the most important policy interventions identified by respondents to foster the adoption of PFTs by small and medium-sized farmers. With regards to the way PFTs would be implemented in practice, most respondents believed that the PFTs will be purchased as a service from private companies by small and medium-sized farmers. Finally, future research is needed to study the impact of policies on the adoption of PFTs for crop protection in order to identify optimized policy pathways to enhance their adoption by small and medium-sized farmers.

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