Consideration of resilience for digital farming systems

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of resilience in digital farming systems, emphasizing the need for reliable, offline-capable solutions to ensure continuous agricultural production during crises.

Contribution

It defines resilience in digital farming, classifies farmers' resilience needs, and proposes hardware and software solutions to enhance system reliability.

Findings

Identification of resilience challenges in web-based farming systems

Classification of farmers' resilience needs into five levels

Recommendations for hardware and software to improve resilience

Abstract

Latest and current innovations of agricultural tech industry are increasingly driven by digital technologies. These digital farming solutions provide attractive advantages for farmers. The trend is going to devices and sensors, which send the acquired data directly to the cloud. Also the number of scientific publications on cloud based solutions follows this development. Considering on the other hand the necessity of continuous agricultural production in any kind of crises, new cloud-based digital systems and applications need to be reliable, independent of internet supply. In this conceptual study the necessary resilience is defined, which is marginally taken into account by agtech industry innovations. Problems of development using web-based farming systems are identified and discussed. For digital farming systems the farmers individual needs of resilience are classified into five levels. Consequently, suggestions for soft- and hardware equipment are made. This includes the installation of a farm server, a local farm network, offline applications and consideration of edge computing, which can ensure a high level of resilience of new digital farming components.