What are the priority research questions for digital agriculture?. (March 2022)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- What are the priority research questions for digital agriculture?. (March 2022)
- Main Title:
- What are the priority research questions for digital agriculture?
- Authors:
- Ingram, Julie
Maye, Damian
Bailye, Clive
Barnes, Andrew
Bear, Christopher
Bell, Matthew
Cutress, David
Davies, Lynfa
de Boon, Auvikki
Dinnie, Liz
Gairdner, Julian
Hafferty, Caitlin
Holloway, Lewis
Kindred, Daniel
Kirby, David
Leake, Bethany
Manning, Louise
Marchant, Ben
Morse, Aimee
Oxley, Simon
Phillips, Martin
Regan, Áine
Rial-Lovera, Karen
Rose, David C.
Schillings, Juliette
Williams, Fiona
Williams, Hefin
Wilson, Lucy - Abstract:
- Abstract: There is a need to identify key existing and emerging issues relevant to digitalisation in agricultural production that would benefit from a stronger evidence base and help steer policy formulation. To address this, a prioritisation exercise was undertaken to identify priority research questions concerning digital agriculture in the UK, but with a view to also informing international contexts. The prioritisation exercise uses an established and effective participatory methodology for capturing and ordering a wide range of views. The method involves identifying a large number of participants and eliciting an initial long list of research questions which is reduced and refined in subsequent voting stages to select the top priorities by theme. Participants were selected using purposive sampling and snowballing to represent a number of sectors, organisations, companies and disciplines across the UK. They were each invited to submit up to 10 questions according to certain criteria, and this resulted in 195 questions from a range of 40 participants (largely from England with some representation from Scotland and Wales). Preliminary analysis and clustering of these questions through iterative analysis identified seven themes as follows: data governance; data management; enabling use of data and technologies; understanding benefits and uptake of data and technologies; optimising data and technologies for performance; impacts of digital agriculture; and new collaborativeAbstract: There is a need to identify key existing and emerging issues relevant to digitalisation in agricultural production that would benefit from a stronger evidence base and help steer policy formulation. To address this, a prioritisation exercise was undertaken to identify priority research questions concerning digital agriculture in the UK, but with a view to also informing international contexts. The prioritisation exercise uses an established and effective participatory methodology for capturing and ordering a wide range of views. The method involves identifying a large number of participants and eliciting an initial long list of research questions which is reduced and refined in subsequent voting stages to select the top priorities by theme. Participants were selected using purposive sampling and snowballing to represent a number of sectors, organisations, companies and disciplines across the UK. They were each invited to submit up to 10 questions according to certain criteria, and this resulted in 195 questions from a range of 40 participants (largely from England with some representation from Scotland and Wales). Preliminary analysis and clustering of these questions through iterative analysis identified seven themes as follows: data governance; data management; enabling use of data and technologies; understanding benefits and uptake of data and technologies; optimising data and technologies for performance; impacts of digital agriculture; and new collaborative arrangements. Subsequent stages of voting, using an online ranking exercise and a participant workshop for in-depth discussion, refined the questions to a total of 27 priority research questions categorised into 15 gold, 7 silver and 5 bronze, across the 7 themes. The questions significantly enrich and extend previous clustering and agenda setting using literature sources, and provide a range of new perspectives. The analysis highlights the interconnectedness of themes and questions, and proposes two nexus for future research: the different dimensions of value, and the social and institutional arrangements to support digitalisation in agriculture. These emphasise the importance of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, and the need to tackle the binary nature of current analytical frames. These new insights are equally relevant to contexts outside the UK. This paper highlights the need for research actions to inform policy, not only instrumentally by strengthening the evidence base, but also conceptually, to prompt new thinking. To our knowledge this methodology has not been previously applied to this topic. Graphical Abstract: ga1 Highlights: Policy on digital agriculture requires a stronger evidence base. A prioritisation exercise was conducted in UK to identify priority research questions. 195 questions from a range of participants were clustered into seven themes. 27 priority questions (15 gold, 7 silver and 5 bronze) were identified. The questions provide a research framework to steer policy, both in UK and beyond. … (more)
- Is Part Of:
- Land use policy. Volume 114(2022)
- Journal:
- Land use policy
- Issue:
- Volume 114(2022)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 114, Issue 2022 (2022)
- Year:
- 2022
- Volume:
- 114
- Issue:
- 2022
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2022-0114-2022-0000
- Page Start:
- Page End:
- Publication Date:
- 2022-03
- Subjects:
- Digital agriculture -- Digitalisation -- Research priorities -- Stakeholders -- Smart farming -- UK
Land use -- Periodicals
Land use -- Government policy -- Periodicals
Sol, Utilisation du -- Périodiques
Sol, Utilisation du -- Politique gouvernementale -- Périodiques
Electronic journals
333.7305 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02648377 ↗
http://www.elsevier.com/journals ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105962 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0264-8377
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 5146.958700
British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 20663.xml