Making Smart Agriculture Smarter: Challenges in Realizing an IoT-Enabled Agricultural Ecosystem

Precision agriculture or smart farming brings the promise of significantly more efficient systems which lay a substantial foundation for the EU Green Deal in terms of carbon footprint reduction, sustainability, and increased productivity coupled with energy efficiency. However, deployment of technological solutions that enable this new era of agriculture is not without substantial challenges and significant barriers. This chapter addresses the many challenges from multiple perspectives. Beginning with the current agriculture landscape in terms of technology adoption barriers and challenges, we present future pathways toward a new era of smart farming. Next, issues specific to the employment of IoT in the agrifood sector are elaborated upon, ranging from informational, behavioral, and social issues to technological, business, and financial matters. Following this, the capability of the DEMETER project to address these is presented. In this respect, an overview of the DEMETER main concepts and objectives is provided, while the multi-actor approach employed to tackle the project’s vision is introduced. Finally, this chapter provides an outline of the 20 large-scale pilots to be executed by DEMETER, which spans 18 countries, 80 sites, and several thousands of farmers, devices, and machinery and aims to optimize various operations in the entire food supply chain resulting in reduced effort and costs, higher food quality and safety, reduced environmental footprint, increased stakeholder cooperation, etc. This chapter concludes with an insight on the current situation of the digital transformation of the agrifood sector and the role that DEMETER aims to fulfill in promoting this.