Digital farming, here I aaaaam!
The EU post-coronavirus recovery project for the agrifood sector features a key section dedicated to the digitalization. The prominent theme in this project is the “Farm to Fork”, an approach through which the EU will help all actors in the food chain deploy online solutions to preserve their business and achieve more sustainability goals, during the pandemic and also beyond. That should be done through the Common Agricultural Policy and the Horizon Europe funding, which should support farmers’ investment in digital farming.
The opportunity for the digital revolution in the agriculture sector
This EU recovery plan is seen as an opportunity for the digital revolution in the agriculture sector, and digital farming is already booming as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. And even if this trend is set to continue after the lockdown, the pace of digital change and of farmers’ readiness differs considerably among European countries.
France, Germany, and Italy are the biggest countries in this sector, yet they show widely varying levels of digitalization. In a recent study of more than 550 micro-producers in these three countries, we observed that in Germany 90% of them have an e-commerce to sell their products directly to consumers, regionally or nationwide, half of which can even sell cross-border. In France, that number falls to 40% and in Italy to 20%, but Italian producers have been massively deploying online transaction systems since the beginning of the pandemic to provide their clients with contactless shopping solutions. At that pace, Italy will soon achieve France’s agrifood digitation level and probably go even beyond that. Will France pick up the pace? Maybe. Since the French producers have been predominantly using cooperatives and other organizations for the distribution of their products, they perceive less urgency to provide contactless solutions to consumers, and that might slow the pace of their digital transformation.
The right combination to build the agrifood digital system of the future
But that is not a problem. This type of digitalization is very special: the agriculture sector is based on natural resources that cannot be 100% controlled by digital technology. A cow needs to be fed. Apples need to be picked. Crops need to be harvested, and so forth. Even if digital technology can participate in any agricultural value chain, it cannot be left to manage 100% of it. Human power must always be there to make sure the chain doesn’t stop.
The pandemic has shown the virtues of digital farming and in particular the ability of producers of any size to get more connected to provide contactless remote solutions for the distribution of their products. More than ever, the digitalization of agrifood should on the one hand offer a steady development of access to digital channels to all farms across borders, and on the other hand, adapt to the local economy and infrastructure differences of each country. Combining local value chain expertise with digital technology will be a great help to build the agrifood system of the future.