Farm advisors amid the transition to Agriculture 4.0: Professional identity, conceptions of the future and future‐specific competencies

Abstract

The transition to Agriculture 4.0 creates new responsibilities for farm advisors and initiates changes to the professional trajectories. In this work, following a mixed research design, we examine how Greek advisors experience the transition to and anticipate the future of Agriculture 4.0. We also aim at identifying what elements they are changing in their professional identities to respond to the challenges associated with Agriculture 4.0, which are the new responsibility‐related competency needs that this transition generates, and how conceptions of the future of farming impact upon these needs. Our findings suggest that the transition to Agriculture 4.0 urges the emergence of a new culture, in which data and technology are considered more reliable than human advice, and creates new responsibility gaps. To cope with these changes, advisors add new roles in their professional identities, emphasising the principle of beneficence and paying limited attention to the societal externalities of transition. Advisors view Agriculture 4.0 as a threat or disruption more than as evolution or promise. In parallel, they prioritise different sets of competencies needed to responsibly facilitate agricultural digitalisation, depending on how they grasp the future of Agriculture 4.0.

Experiential, Social, Connectivist, or Transformative Learning? Farm Advisors and the Construction of Agroecological Knowledge

“…The regressions also uncovered that experiential learning was the most important predictor of participants' transformation. That is not surprising, since advisors' experiences facilitate their reflection [70,71], which is pivotal for initiating the process of transformation [61]. The crucial role of experience in constructing an agroecological identity is a consistent finding in the relevant literature.…”

Social and ethical considerations for agricultural robotics

“…These include issues of power -for example, the inability of small-scale farmers to invest in new technologies and the fact that digitalisation tends to favour larger-scale farmers (Bronson and Sengers, 2022), the greater ability of existing powerful companies to set trajectories (Birner et al, 2021;Duncan et al, 2021), or the unequal ownership, use and privacy of data collected from a farm (Wiseman et al, 2019). Concerns also include precision technologies causing further intensification of farming, including larger herds of animals made possible by individual monitoring which could create welfare issues associated with overcrowding (Schillings et al, 2021); the capacity of the existing workforce to adapt to new conditions (Rotz et al, 2019), including advisers (Charatsari et al, 2021); a reduction in farmer autonomy (Brooks, 2021;Duncan et al, 2021); and lack of trust in new technologies .…”

Automation, Climate Change, and the Future of Farm Work: Cross-Disciplinary Lessons for Studying Dynamic Changes in Agricultural Health and Safety

“…For example, we might consider research on the production of new avenues of agriculture, and the working quality and decision-making capacities of agricultural communities. Such a consideration might show how suites of new technologies (sometimes glossed by researchers as Ag 4.0), climate change, and rural community dynamics together influence agricultural outcomes [ 85 , 86 ]. In other words, while our review was designed to detect the intersection of these forces, the majority of the studies we examined did not study these forces as directly related.…”