Digital sustainability in smart agriculture

With reference to sustainable digitalisation in smart agriculture (SmA), available academic literature does not properly clarify whether digitalisation applied at farming is sustainable economically, environmentally, and ethically - in the long period - and whether it is not. The necessity to develop this research lays its basis on the fact that, until now, sustainability researchers, digital scientists and agricultural experts have apparently been studying it in separate tanks with different meanings of SmA sustainability. In this paper, the authors aim at addressing this necessity: the study analyses the relationship between digitalization and sustainability, applied to smart agriculture domain. For this purpose, a framework is proposed to evaluate the digital impact of ICT solution considering both components, i.e., hardware (agricultural machine and related ICT tools and devices) and software (data and information systems). Taking into consideration the hardware, an interesting role to lowering the digital impact is played by retrofitting solutions. Furthermore, a responsible and sober design of info logical-based information systems is fundamental to avoid unnecessary added impacts. The authors’ ambition is to propose a general framework where some accountability could be assigned to specific software or digital strategies, in a SmA life cycle view. From such a standpoint a more integrative and sustainable perspective of digitalisation effects can be foreseen in the agricultural sector.