Digital Agriculture: How diffusion of innovations occur from planning to adoption

Digital Agriculture: How diffusion of innovations occur from planning to adoption - Understanding how digital technologies, data science and remote sensing can lead to the transfer of agricultural innovation.

New technologies and approaches are required if the planet is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Policies and approaches to dealing with local trends (declining yields) and shocks (pests, diseases, erratic climate) need to be co-created using local indigenous knowledge, data and models. This data is needed at increasingly fine spatial and temporal resolutions. Decision makers and scientists need to be able to feed important information to farmers on expected impacts from climate models, new farming practices and seed varieties. However, farmers need to be able to trial these and feed-back information on local contextual issues that will render some practices and seeds inappropriate. In 2018, DFID launched its Digital Strategy to increase the capabilities of digital technology for development. This project seeks to contribute to this strategy and will utilise the unique connections that the CASE Partner (Appendix 2) has with local organisations in Indonesia as well as the DFID Data Science Campus in Scotland to explore how innovations in agricultural practices can be shared to co-create new knowledge on how to best deal with erratic climate.
Link to EPSRC remit: the project falls under the Living with Environmental Change Theme (LWEC). It will involve interdisciplinary research on how information and communications technologies can be developed to create a two way pipeline of data and information to deal with future climatic and environmental changes that present challenges for rural farmers and decision makers.
Potential research questions:
How are innovations in agricultural practices currently transferred between stakeholders?
What are the processes involved in introduction, adoption and scaling up of digital tools in agriculture? & what are the challenges involved in introducing digital tools in agriculture?
What are the socio-cultural dynamics involved in adoption of digital tools in agriculture?
How geospatial techniques and big data can be used to develop innovative diffusion practices?
Methodology: Digital Agriculture is fast emerging, but is it about the technology, or the processes and who benefits and who gets left behind? How do we adopt the right technologies in an inclusive manner? This joint project between NIRAS/LTS Data Futures Hub and UoE will answer these questions. The student will identify with the supervisor team and in collaboration with the CASE partners and the data Futures Hub in Indonesia which locations, agricultural system(s) and innovations on which to focus. The project will involve interdisciplinary research into agricultural innovations which will involve local indigenous knowledge systems, precision agriculture, data science and remote sensing. The focus will be on identifying technologies that can be implemented to help the co-creation of information rather than a linear top-down or bottom-up approach.