Evolving Agri-Futures: Understanding the dynamics and impacts of digital transition in agricultural systems

In recent decades, the agricultural sector has undergone a profound digital transformation, with the potential to fundamentally reshape farming practices. This transformation can reconfigure routines, demand novel skills and knowledge and alter the roles and relationships of the stakeholders. While these changes manifest at the farm level, their impacts extend across the broader agricultural system. When a digital technology is introduced into a social system, it evolves into a socio-technical system, in which social actors and technological entities interact to produce outcomes. These outcomes can be positive or negative, commonly referred to as benefits or costs and occur across multiple dimensions, including economic, environmental, social and governance levels. A lack of understanding of these dynamics, combined with inefficient strategies to minimise costs could exacerbate the adverse effects of digital technologies. Such consequences may hinder the adoption of innovations that have the potential to advance sustainability goals, if implemented thoughtfully. Moreover, they could adversely affect farmers who have already invested in and adopted these technologies. At the system level, this could lead to broader challenges, including reduced farmers’ autonomy, increased dependence on external actors, social inequities, and a widening digital divide. These challenges are particularly pronounced in ecological farming approaches such as agroecology, where the guiding principles emphasise biodiversity, local knowledge and social equity. In such systems, farmers’ rights and autonomy are central, and any disruption such as poorly implemented digital technologies can have far-reaching consequences for both ecological integrity and the social fabric of farming communities. Moreover, the integration of digital technologies in agroecological systems is characterised by conflicting narratives that reflect both their potential opportunities and challenges. This ambiguity provided the motivation for further investigation and led to the selection of an agroecological farm as a case study in this research. Alongside the agroecological farm, two additional cases, one at the experimental development stage and the other at the living lab stage were selected to examine context-specific impacts and understand how different stages of the digital transition influence one another. Given the importance and vulnerability of the agricultural sector, understanding the implications of digitalisation is essential for identifying pathways that maximise benefits and minimise adverse impacts across multiple dimensions of agricultural system. To address this need, this research was undertaken with the central research question: • How does a digital transition alter the dynamics of an existing system and what are the associated impacts? In this regard, this research adopts a socio-technical perspective and draws on the CODECS conceptual framework, which conceptualises agricultural digitalisation as a context-specific phenomenon generating impacts across three levels – business process level, digital ecosystem level and socioenvironmental level. Based on this conceptual foundation, two methodological approaches – Technography and BPMN-CBA were employed to investigate the dynamics and impacts of agricultural digital transitions. The results highlight that digital technologies reconfigure agricultural systems by reshaping actors’ roles, relationships, skills, knowledge, farm practices, rules and routines. Economically, they can reduce input costs, improve product quality and increase profitability, but require substantial capital and operational investments for hiring specialists and maintaining infrastructure. Environmentally, they can reduce chemical use and spray drift, thereby supporting ecosystem health and biodiversity, although the environmental implications of their energy consumption remain uncertain. Socially, they facilitate knowledge transfer, collaboration and innovation. However, they also alter the roles of farmers and end-users, with new responsibilities often assumed by technicians. Contrary to some existing narratives on agricultural labour dynamics, the findings of this study indicate that traditional labour was not displaced by technical specialists, although future displacement may occur if farm workers do not develop the skills required to engage with digital technologies. At the governance level, digital technologies can support data-driven decision-making while complementing, rather than replacing, farmers’ experience-based judgments. However, infrastructural constraints, particularly limited connectivity in agroecological farms, remain as a barrier to the adoption of digital innovations. Overall, the study demonstrates that digital technologies can reinforce agroecological performance and agricultural sustainability when supported by appropriate socio-technical networks and the development of relevant capabilities. The key findings emphasise the importance of stakeholder collaboration across the agricultural value chain, particularly in overcoming structural barriers. Strengthening end-users’ capabilities is critical to reducing the digital divide and addressing social inequities. The study also found limited involvement of farmers in technology design and development during the research experiments, highlighting the need for greater end-user engagement to address context-specific needs and improve scalability. Participatory approaches, such as co-creation through living labs can facilitate farmer-centred, place-based innovation. Technological companies emerged as central actors across all three contexts, underscoring the potential of public-private partnerships to support the dissemination of digital technologies. Communal ownership models and targeted financial incentives can further help overcome economic barriers to adoption. While the study provides valuable insights, it is subject to limitations with purposive sampling, the novelty of the methodologies and potential stakeholder biases, which may constrain the generalisability of the findings. These limitations were mitigated through data triangulation and a systems perspective in interpreting the findings. Further research should apply and refine these methodologies across diverse agricultural contexts to strengthen the evidence-base for sustainable digital transitions.