Science Wednesday: digitalisation in agricultural knowledge and advice

October 20th, 2021

During his time as a CSIRO Early Career fellow in the Digiscape Future Science Platform, human geographer Simon Fielke had the opportunity to study the process of digitalization in a number of different agricultural sectors across Australia. In this 2020 paper in Agricultural Systems Simon, together with Bruce Taylor & Emma Jakku have reviewed the literature on how the provision of agricultural knowledge and advice is being impacted by digital transformation.

One important insight in their review is that digitalization is not the only transformation under way. Both information seeking and
knowledge production are diversifying; roles are specializing (in Australia we’re seeing “digital specialist” emerge as a role in advisory firms); advisory services are steadily being privatised; and emerging kinds of demand are creating new information gaps.

A second is that the concerns of different actors are different. To simplify: landholders are concerned that digital knowledge should be  transparent; private advisors that it be highly connected; and public advisory services that it should be well-governed.

Well worth reading the whole thing!

Simon Fielke at the Responsible Agtech Symposium in May 2021

Numbers of papers over time matching a Scopus query for digital agriculture governance