The agriculture sector faces many challenges, including increasing demand for food, climate change and lack of workers.

Data-driven innovation is transforming farm management through the so-called precision agriculture approach. By leveraging satellites, drones and IoT sensors in farm equipment, an unprecedented amount of data can be collected to monitor the conditions of the crops, soil and other key elements for cultivation, as well as cattle. This allows farmers to manage irrigation, fertilisation and all the farming processes in a scientific way, minimising costs and the use of pesticides and maximising outputs.

The digitisation of the farming processes represents also the first step for the emerging food track-and-tracing systems developed to guarantee quality and safety, highly appreciated in the food-agriculture value chain. This represents a truly digital transformation for a sector which in the past used very little ICT.

The Advanced Technology Watch report has been developed in the framework of the ‘Advanced Technologies for Industry’ (ATI) project, initiated by the European Commission, DG GROW and the EASME.

As part of a series of analytical reports on advanced technologies’ trends, this report represents the first issue of a comprehensive monitoring tool endowing policymakers, industry, researchers, and other relevant stakeholders with regularly updatable research. The AT-Watch report series is meant to play a complementary role to the other analytical, policy and statistical reports of the project, by focusing on market, business, and socio-economic trends driven by technology innovation. This Advanced Technology Watch encompasses therefore the whole set of advanced technologies that are a priority for the European industrial policy.