Opinion: Smart farming is key to developing sustainable agriculture.

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. 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 revolution to avoid “lock-ins”: advocates and skeptics of technology need to engage in an open dialogue on the future development of farming in the digital era. Only if aspects of technology, diversity of crop and livestock systems, and networking and institutions (i.e. markets and policies), are considered jointly in the dialogue, should farming in the digital era be termed “smart farming.”