In the last years, digital technologies strongly burst into the traditional concept of “agriculture” triggering a revolutionary change of paradigm. Like in every young technological field, some of the emerging solutions will reach a high level of adoption, some of them, instead, will fail and disappear. Hence, what are the technologies in the future of sustainable precision agriculture? Which tools should an agripreneur of tomorrow be able to manage?
To answer these questions we need to outline the actual technological landscape, follow the trajectories of development and look ahead to their future evolution. With this purpose, Sparkle’s partnership will perform a technological foresight analysis.
The aim of a foresight analysis is the prediction of the most likely future scenarios through the accurate observation of present and past events. A foresight analysis can be performed mainly through three methods:
- Based on data: data are collected from one or more sources connected to a phenomenon of interest and statistically analysed;
- Based on experts: a pool of field’s experts is involved through interviews and surveys, results are then statistically processed in order to increase the objectivity;
- Hybrid method: combination of both the previous methods, joining the objectivity of the first one and the effectiveness of the second one.
In Sparkle project a hybrid analysis will be performed: starting from the collection of data from patents and scientific literature and analysing them through dedicated software applications, Erre Quadro will discover new trends in sustainable precision agriculture. Finally, experts of the field belonging to the partnership will validate results and find out valuable insights.
Since it is our aim to look ahead, the results of this analysis will allow the development of learning courses focussed on the skills that the agriculture of the future really needs and we hope that will help the professionals of tomorrow to build a more efficient and sustainable world.