Strengthening transparency mechanisms and direct producer-consumer interaction can increase trust in organic vegetables and reduce reliance on costly third-party certification in West Java. Digital engagement tools that support storytelling, traceability, and feedback loops offer a scalable pathway for improving market linkages for smallholder organic farmers. Participatory co creation processes can enhance farmer visibility and help policymakers design more inclusive organic food systems. Supporting digital literacy and community facilitation resources is essential for implementing co creation based B2C models in smallholder agricultural settings. This study shows that transparent and participatory value creation can address key structural weaknesses in Indonesia's organic vegetable sector, including mistrust, fragmented distribution, and limited producer visibility. Field evidence demonstrates that co creation practices strengthen consumer confidence, improve information flows, and enable smallholder farmers to access new relational market spaces beyond price-based competition. To explain how these outcomes emerge, the research develops a value co creation-based Business to Consumer model tailored to the agrifood context of West Java. The study uses a qualitative and integrative design involving semi structured interviews, focus group discussions, and strategic analysis through the ERRC Grid and Strategy Canvas. The approach combines relational insights from Service Dominant Logic with value innovation principles from Blue Ocean Strategy to reframe how transparency, digital engagement, and collaborative quality assurance can be operationalised in smallholder food systems. The resulting model offers a contextually grounded contribution to agricultural transformation by demonstrating how interaction centred mechanisms can support more resilient, trustworthy, and inclusive organic markets in emerging economy settings.
Financing constraints and the volatility of green output are key factors contributing to the low resilience of green agricultural supply chains. This study develops a novel game-theoretic framework to investigate how the Blockchain of Things (BoT) enhances the resilience of capital-constrained green agricultural supply chains. By comparing Traditional Purchase Order Financing (TPOF, reliant on fixed-asset collateral and incurring high costs for price signaling) with BoT-based Purchase Order Financing (BPOF, utilizing liquid-asset collateral and enabling verifiable effort signaling), it is found that BoT can enhance supply chain resilience through the following three core mechanisms: (1) It expands financing accessibility by allowing farmers with high financing demands to participate in the financing process when the prices of traditional crops are high; (2) It facilitates favorable redistribution of supply chain profits under specific market conditions; and (3) When information asymmetry exists regarding the cost of greening efforts, BoT exerts significantly heterogeneous effects on the supply resilience of high-efficiency and low-efficiency farmers, and BPOF can enhance resilience by optimizing the transmission mechanism of cost information. However, the resilience of the supply chain under TPOF is higher when the prices of traditional crops are extremely low. The findings of this study can provide management recommendations for agricultural stakeholders and promote the digital and green transformation of agriculture.
Digital agricultural extension services (DAES) are expected to improve smallholders' information access, yet the reasons why many farmers discontinue use after initial trials remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on micro-survey data from 1,475 fruit and vegetable growers in three Chinese provinces, this study uses a Double-Hurdle model to distinguish initial adoption from continuous adoption and to identify their distinct drivers. It further applies Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment (IPWRA) to estimate the welfare effect of DAES adoption on per capita household net income. Results show an initial adoption rate of 60.14% but a continuous adoption rate of only 24%, revealing a pronounced "adoption-continuous adoption" gap. Resource endowments, behavioral mechanisms such as risk appetite and social networks, and institutional supply such as digital accessibility and government trust significantly promote both stages, whereas perceived extreme weather consistently constrains adoption. Welfare analysis indicates that DAES adoption increases annual per capita household net income by approximately 12.6%. By integrating behavioral economics with institutional analysis, this study clarifies the stage-wise logic through which farmers move from initial digital access to sustained use and identifies policy pathways for digital literacy support, climate-adaptive services, and institutional trust rebuilding.
Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics are reshaping agri-food systems and accelerating the emergence of Digital Innovation Ecosystems (DIEs): multi-actor, digitally enabled collaboration systems that connect shared data and infrastructure, governance, financing, and learning. Yet benefits are not automatic. Outcomes depend on ecosystem design and orchestration, particularly for smallholders and other underserved actors. We identify current developments in DIEs and examine how they can foster cross-learning, collaboration, inclusivity, and alignment of public-private investment to enable scalable and responsible innovation, including Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (ELSA). These insights are derived from an international two-day workshop convening similar to 50 experts from research, industry, policy, and civil society, organized into six tracks. Workshop outcomes (through artefacts such as pitches, breakout notes, plenary boards) were analysed, interpreted and placed in the context of literature, synthesized via a track-by-theme matrix, and prioritized using novelty, feasibility, and expected impact. Discussions converged on seven developments: (1) infrastructure and interoperability as enabling conditions; (2) trust, governance, and farmer agency; (3) aligning investment across the 'twilight zone'; (4) smallholder inclusion and first-mile design; (5) responsible innovation and ELSA integration; (6) AI validation and human-centric design; and (7) supply-chain ecosystem governance and standards. For each development we provide a priority-tagged research and action agenda with time horizons (near, medium, long) and primary stakeholders. The paper offers a transparent, reproducible synthesis and a practical roadmap to build inclusive, ethically grounded, and scalable DIEs, globally relevant in framing, but requiring context-specific adaptation, particularly in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) settings.
The current "nitrogen crisis" in the Netherlands calls for new policies to reduce the national emission of nitrogen, starting with agriculture. Considering the voluntary nature of most policies, it is important to understand farmers' preferences for different nitrogen abatement options. This paper ranks the preferences of Dutch dairy farmers regarding four investment options and four management practices using a best-worst scaling survey experiment. Results show that farmers prefer management practices over investment options for nitrogen abatement. Behavioural-economic factors explain some preference heterogeneity. Risk attitude and time discounting are associated most with investment options. Policy design should align incentives with farm structures and investment capacity.
