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December 2001 - present
Publications
Publications (134)
CONTEXT
Digital technologies nowadays play a major role in innovation within the agri-food domain. The evolution of IT systems has currently arrived at a level that involves complex systems integration and business ecosystems in which many stakeholders in different roles are involved. A new paradigm for digital innovation is needed that copes with...
The invention of the computer mid-last century initiated the third industrial revolution or digital revolution, which started the digitalization of society, a society in which documents were digitized, and communication became digital. Digitalization defines the adoption of digital technology through replacing non-digital or manual processes with d...
Autonomous tractors, spraying drones, robotics and fully autonomous farms are possible outcomes of the digital transformation trend in agriculture and food systems which is fostered by continuous technological advancement and the increasing connectivity capacity. These futuristic scenarios will be unlocked by 5G connectivity, the next step after 4G...
Sustainability is a major challenge in agri-food systems. Digital technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) hold substantial promises for attaining the sustainability goals of the economy, environment and society at large. However, in practice it is difficult to evaluate to which extent these technologies contribute to sustainable development...
CONTEXT
Digitalisation affects the agri-food sector and its governance. However, what digitalisation of the sector will imply for future agricultural policymaking remains unclear.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of the study is to develop and evaluate explorative scenarios of digitalisation in the agri-food sector of Europe that are explicitly relevant to...
The Mansholt lectures, named for the great Dutch European politician and thinker Sicco Mansholt, are organised by Wageningen University & Research to discuss European policy and issues in our domain: nutrition, agriculture and sustainable livelihoods.
In 2016 WUR started to organise the annual Mansholt lectures. During the lectures WUR presents mu...
During the 2021 Mansholt Lecture, which was presented to the European Commission in Brussels on 22 September 2021, WUR presented the options and challenges for stakeholders in the transition towards a sustainable digital innovation ecosystem. In this accompanying policy article we argue that Europe needs to consider creating an integral European po...
With the many promises it holds in addressing problems concerning information exchange and digital transactions in multi-actor processes, blockchain technology (BCT) has gained considerable traction in the agrifood sector. Governments, international organisations, private companies, consortia of public and private actors are launching various block...
We propose to analyze the supply chain not (just) as interconnected firms where products move from primary production, through processing, down to final consumer (user), but rather as collaborating firms that exchange information in order for each to function. This opens the analysis of supply chains up for institutional economic analysis and also...
Digital Twins are very promising to bring smart farming to new levels of farming productivity and sustainability. A Digital Twin is a digital equivalent of a real-life object of which it mirrors its behaviour and states over its lifetime in a virtual space. Using Digital Twins as a central means for farm management enables the decoupling of physica...
This chapter focuses on how digitization can accelerate convergence in science and innovation, examining how it can support design, operation, and adaptive learning for the system as a whole and for actors along supply chains and markets. It briefly reviews key tenets of convergence science and innovation (CI). The first key enabler of CI is the co...
Conventional science, technology and innovation (STI) agendas have fueled powerful economic growth and social progress around the world. However, negative outcomes associated with such growth progressively cumulated in a set of interconnected grand challenges like climate change, hunger, and other goals of sustainable development. Societal-scale so...
The development of digital agriculture or smart farming highlights the importance of data and data exchange. This chapter discusses how to achieve data standardization as a critical success factor in agricultural decision-making. It emphasizes the importance of starting from understanding business processes and decision-making steps. The chapter re...
SmartAgriHubs is a €20 M EU project under the Horizon 2020 instrument, and brings together a consortium of well over 164 partners in the European agri-food sector. The project aims to realise the digitisation of European agriculture by fostering an agricultural innovation ecosystem dedicated to excellence, sustainability and success. This paper des...
Sensors, drones, weather satellites and robots are examples of technologies that make farming ‘smart’. In this article we present the results of our review of the literature that concerns the ethical challenges that smart farming raises. Our reading suggests that current ethical discussion about smart farming circles around three themes: (1) data o...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be a real game changer that will drastically improve productivity and sustainability in food and farming. However, current IoT applications in this domain are still fragmentary and mainly used by a small group of early adopters. The Internet of Food and Farm 2020 Large-Scale Pilot (IoF2020) addresses the...
Big Data is becoming a new asset in the agri-food sector including enterprise data from operational systems, sensor data, farm equipment data, etc. Recently, Big Data applications are being implemented to improve farm and chain performance in agri-food networks. Still, many companies are refraining from sharing data because of fear of governance is...
Smart Farming is a development that emphasizes the use of information and communication technology in the cyber-physical farm management cycle. New technologies such as the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing are expected to leverage this development and introduce more robots and artificial intelligence in farming. This is encompassed by the phe...
Big Data is becoming a new asset in the agri-food sector including enterprise data from operational systems, sensor data, farm equipment data, etc. Recently, Big Data applications are being implemented to improve farm and chain performance in agri-food networks. Still, many companies are refraining from sharing data because of fear of governance is...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be a real game changer that will drastically improve productivity and sustainability in food and farming. However, current IoT applications in this domain are still fragmentary and mainly used by a small group of early adopters. The Internet of Food and Farm 2020 Large-Scale Pilot (IoF2020) addresses the...
This literature review on Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture and food, provides an overview of
existing applications, enabling technologies and main challenges ahead. The results of the review
show that this subject received attention by the scientific community from 2010 on and the number
of papers has increased since then. The literature on...
New technologies become available to support agro and food production. New concepts like Smart Farming are driving innovations and the way we work together. Also research has to adapt and be aware what these new technologies, like Big Data and Internet of Things, and new concepts can bring them. There is an increasing need for cooperation according...
Smart farming is a management style that includes smart monitoring, planning and control of agricultural processes. This management style requires the use of a wide variety of software and hardware systems from multiple vendors. Adoption of smart farming is hampered because of a poor interoperability and data exchange between ICT components hinderi...
Internet technologies allow supply chains to use virtualizations dynamically in operational management processes. This will improve support for food companies in dealing with perishable products, unpredictable supply variations and stringent food safety and sustainability requirements. Virtualization enables supply chain actors to monitor, control,...
Modern information-based technologies, such as self-driving tractors, GPS (global positioning systems), robot milking machines, automated egg production, drones, satellite data and social media, will change farm practices and agricultural structures and contribute to the prosperity and resilience of farming systems. Food chains will not only become...
Logistics in the food and agribusiness industry must address perishable products, unpredictable supply variations and stringent food safety and sustainability requirements. The Internet of Things (IoT) could contribute significantly to solve these challenges because it allows for remotely controlling the location and conditions of shipments and pro...
Farming nowadays is a complex managerial task that imposes stringent requirements on farm management information systems. In other sectors, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely implemented to meet such requirements. This paper assesses the applicability of ERP systems in the agri-food domain by investigating the experiences of agri...
The Agriculture business domain, as a vital part of the overall supply chain, is expected to highly evolve in the upcoming years via the developments, which are taking place on the side of the Future Internet. This paper presents a novel Business-to-Business collaboration platform from the agri-food sector perspective, which aims to facilitate the...
The Agriculture business domain, as a vital part of the overall supply chain, is expected to highly evolve in the upcoming years via the developments, which are taking place on the side of the Future Internet. This paper presents a novel Business-to-Business collaboration platform from the agri-food sector perspective, which aims to facilitate the...
Farm enterprises2
The objective of this paper is to describe a farm information model and a proof of concept that demonstrates how a collaborative Business Process for farming can be configured using this farm information model. Knowledge to develop this model and a proof of concept is obtained by case study research focusing on the collaborative B...
Transparency in meat supply chains is necessary to guarantee the safety, quality and trust of consumers in meat products. However, transparency systems currently in place are often not adequate for sharing transparency data among food operators, providing consumers accurate transparency information, or enabling authorities to respond quickly and ef...
Supply chains are being transformed into agile networks in response the increasing volatility of business environments. The dynamic nature of business collaboration in such networks imposes stringent demands on the enabling software systems. This paper proposes the application of a mass customization approach to meet the great demands on software s...
It is expected that the world population will further expand from the current 6 billion to 9-11 billion people in 2050. This faces us with an enormous challenge to feed this population and still keep production within the limits of planet Earth's carrying capacity. Smart Farming - i.e. the use of smart, data-rich ICT-services and applications, in c...
Agri-Food Supply Chain Networks are required to increase production and to be transparent while reducing environmental impact. This challenges farm enterprises to innovate their production processes. These processes need to be supported by advanced ICT components that are developed by multiple vendors and owned by different enterprises. These ICT c...
Recent technological advances have paved the way for developing and offering advanced services for the stakeholders in the agricultural sector. A paradigm shift is underway from proprietary and monolithic tools to Internet-based, cloud hosted, open systems that will enable more effective collaboration between stakeholders. This new paradigm include...
At the present time, we are facing an emerging problem which will become even more urgent and critical in the coming decades: the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates an increase of the world population from the current 6 billion people to 9-11 billion people by 2050 leading to a doubling of world-wide food deman...
The Future Internet is expected to greatly influence how the food and agriculture sector is currently operating. In this paper, we present the specific characteristics of the agri-food sector focusing on how information management in this area will take place under a highly heterogeneous group of actors and services, based on the EU SmartAgriFood p...
Information and Communication Technology as a Driver for Change in Agri‐food Chains
Agri‐food chains will be changed in the coming years by Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Technological trends and economic analysis suggest that ICT will be a major driver for innovation. Satellites and sensors make precision agriculture possible. Mor...
In our networked society, standards play an important role. That is especially the case in exchanging digital data. With “Standards” we refer to the protocols that describe how data (in so called ‘metadata’) and the data-exchange are defined to make a digital exchange of data between two devices (often computers but also computer-machine interactio...
Smart/precision farming systems are expected to play an important role in improving farming activities. During the past years, sophisticated farm management systems have emerged to replace outdated complex and monolithic farm systems and software tools. The latest trend is to enable these management systems to operate over the Internet. However, th...
This paper discusses the specific challenges of the agri-food sector in the light of research carried out in the SmartAgriFood project. Using questionnaires and focus groups, our research identifies a number of business needs and drivers which enable the identification of suitable Future Internet technologies across the three sub-domains of Smart F...
The food and agribusiness is an important sector in European logistics with a share in the EU road transport of about 20%. One of the main logistic challenges in this sector is to deal with the high dynamics and uncertainty in supply and demand. This paper defines requirements on Future Internet (FI) technologies that have to be met to accomplish t...
This paper discusses a project, introducing a dynamic product flow model for optimizing mixed ecological farms. Mixed ecological farms focus upon closing cycles and management is based on control of ecological processes. The aim is to provide a tool for farmers to tune their farm to its specific ecological, economical and social environment. The pr...
The study presented in this paper shows that the Dutch horticulture is active in the field of information management. Much progress is made, among others in the development and adoption of eBusiness standards. However, the development of information management in the sector is still fragmented and too slow. Furthermore, it is found that most projec...
Dutch agri-food supply chain network actors can use technologies, (web) services and tools to
increase sustainable production and chain transparency in agriculture. Adoption of these
(web) services and tools in arable farming is still low. Therefore, the Dutch ministry of
agriculture started a public-private project to support more sustainable crop...
Betere toepassingen van ICT geven Europa een economische voorsprong. Dat is de gedachte achter het EU-project Future Internet. Wageningen UR coördineert het onderdeel agrifood. ‘Er liggen grote vragen op het gebied van bijvoorbeeld online gegevensbescherming’, vertelt Sjaak Wolfert van het LEI, onderdeel van Wageningen UR.
Information exchange is a crucial factor in modern farm management, especially when the whole agri-food supply chain network is taken into account. This requires flexible information systems for which a common digital infrastructure is needed. Development of such an infrastructure is, technically and organizationally seen, a huge challenge. In this...
The growing importance of health in consumption is expected to result in a significant increase of European fruit demand. However, the current fruit supply does not yet sufficiently meet demand requirements. This urges fruit supply chains to become more demand-driven, that is, able to continuously match supply capabilities to changing demand requir...
Agri-food enterprises operate in a complex and dynamic environment. To meet increasing demands of consumers, government and business partners, enterprises continuously have to work on innovations of products, processes and ways of cooperation in agri-food supply chain networks (AFSCN). Hence, a development towards a more knowledge-based economy is...
This report outlines the impact of ICT on the food economy. On the basis of a literature review from four disciplines - knowledge management, management information systems, operations research and logistics, and economics - the demand for new ICT applications, the supply of new applications and the match between demand and supply are identified. S...
In dit rapport wordt de huidige situatie op het gebied van integrale digitale informatievoorziening in de tuinbouwsector in kaart gebracht en geanalyseerd. Vervolgens worden de contouren geschetst van een mogelijk programma voor verbetering en integratie van deze digitale informatievoorziening. Hiermee wordt een overzicht geboden van de huidige ini...