Horticultural production is often capital intensive and generates high economic value, creating strong potential for the use of digital technologies (DTs). However, their adoption remains constrained by a wide range of determinants. Existing studies have examined DT adoption in horticulture from different perspectives and theoretical frameworks, but the evidence remains fragmented. This systematic review synthesizes current knowledge on DT adoption by distinguishing three adoption constructs: willingness to adopt (WTA), behavioral intention (BI), and usage behavior (UB). Following PRISMA guidelines, 129 empirical studies were included in the systematic review, of which 54 contributed data to the meta-analysis. The qualitative synthesis shows that studies of BI mainly focus on psychological and social determinants, whereas studies of UB more often examine technical, knowledge, social, infrastructure, and institutional determinants. Evidence on WTA remains comparatively limited. The meta-analysis shows that age, social influence, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use are significantly associated with BI. For UB, significant positive associations were found for sex, education level, training participation, planting area, farming income, household income, organization or cooperative membership, risk attitude, social network, and social influence. Subgroup analyses further showed that some associations with UB varied across geographic regions, crop systems, and DT types. The findings show that the relevance of adoption determinants differs across WTA, BI, and UB and varies across horticultural contexts. This study provides a more differentiated understanding of DT adoption in horticulture and offers evidence for developing more targeted policy, technical, and institutional support.

Ambitions to move aquaculture offshore have gained momentum as a means of expanding healthy, sustainable marine or ‘blue’ food. Yet faced with few operational offshore aquaculture farms, the sector has started to search for ways in which aquaculture can contribute to wider sustainability challenges related to nature, energy and coastal economies. This paper identifies five search directions for innovating and realizing offshore low trophic aquaculture in the Dutch North Sea based on a combination of motivations, imagined futures and the mobilization of resources and relations. These diverse search directions show that motivations for offshore aquaculture innovation and imagined futures go beyond food production to include regional identity, alternative sustainable products, integrated nature-food systems, and the emergence of new offshore industries. However, the results also show that current efforts to mobilize actors and resources remain narrowly focused on offshore food production. Future research and policy for offshore aquaculture should recognize the gap between broad motivations and imaginaries and the narrow focus of current efforts on food. This requires more explicit recognition of aquaculture’s diverse roles in wider offshore innovation and the social and political processes shaping it. We therefore call for greater attention to open innovation processes integrating aquaculture in a variety of desirable offshore futures.

Digital extension and farmer-centric design are increasingly presented as complementary strategies for transforming agricultural innovation systems: digital extension promises scale and efficiency, while farmer-centric design is expected to ensure relevance, inclusivity, and legitimacy. This paper challenges the assumption that these approaches are naturally aligned. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, we examine how farmer-centricity is enacted within digital extension initiatives and how its normative commitments are reshaped as digital platforms evolve. Empirically, we analyse two digital extension platforms developed between 2014 and 2024, one in the Global North and one in the Global South. Drawing on public-facing media, organisational records, design documents, and technical walkthroughs of each platform, we trace how normative, technical, and interpretive frames interact across different phases of platform development. Our findings show that, in early phases, digital extension is framed as enabling farmer-centric design, supporting decentralised design practices, epistemic pluralism, and farmer sovereignty. Over time, however, farmer-centricity becomes instrumentalised to support the scaling of digital extension through data generation, peer diffusion, and environmental accountability, placing new forms of labour and responsibility onto farmers without a commensurate redistribution of authority. These tensions are not resolved but reconfigured through design practices, often obscured by the rhetoric of empowerment and responsiveness. We conceptualise this dynamic as algorithmic participation: a form of participation mediated through digital infrastructures that anticipate and steer farmer engagement in ways that stabilise existing innovation logics. The paper contributes to debates on farmer-centric design and digital extension by showing how even well-intentioned practices can reproduce structural inequalities.

Farmer-veterinarian interaction is central to how responsibility for animal health and antimicrobial use is enacted. Especially in intensive pig systems, where high animal density, economic pressures, and stringent biosecurity requirements elevate both zoonotic risks and public health concerns. Yet, empirical research on these interactions remains limited as these are often embedded in broader animal health studies and disproportionately focused on dairy contexts. This scoping review synthesizes 40 empirical studies on farmer-veterinarian interaction in intensive pig farming, applying PRISMA-ScR methodology and a four-level socio-ecological framework encompassing individual, interpersonal, interprofessional, and systemic influences. Eligible sources included all studies including relevant empirical insights published until July 2023, with no geographical restrictions, retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, Agricola, and CAB Abstracts. Findings indicate that veterinarians in intensive pig farming are increasingly positioned as strategic partners in herd health management. Their influence depends not only on technical expertise but also on trust, embeddedness in local practice, and their role in enabling ongoing learning in complex farm environments. However, tensions persist. Farmers may turn to peer networks over professional advice in times of stress, especially under economic pressure, and divergent views and priorities concerning animal health management, welfare, and antimicrobial use can complicate interaction. Structural pressures-such as short-term economic incentives, market constraints, and the dual commercial-regulatory role of veterinarians- further limit joint decision-making capacity. Although zoonotic risk and antimicrobial resistance dominate macro-level policy discourse, these concerns did not emerge as central themes in the empirical literature on everyday farmer-veterinarian interaction. By adopting a multi-level lens, this review exposes the layered complexity of human-animal health governance in industrial livestock systems. The synthesis offers a systems-aware perspective on how contextually situated relationships shape management behaviours, health and biosecurity outcomes. These insights support more effective policy design and cross-sectoral collaboration at the livestock-public health interface for resilient livestock farming.

Increasingly, European member states are using remote sensing technologies to determine if farmers comply with measures of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Member states use satellite images, aerial photographs and geotagged pictures, and combine this with advanced algorithms and machine learning to determine if farmers comply with requirements that they have set out in their CAP strategic plans. Our research analyses the use of satellite images and the software used to process this data at paying agencies to understand how these technologies are enabling new forms of governance and what these technologies mean for how farmers are seen (literally and figuratively) by government agencies. This research is based on 12 semi-structured interviews with the developers of the technologies used to monitor compliance, which includes people working for paying agencies as well as people working at research institutes and companies where they provide technical support to the development and use of remote sensing at paying agencies.This research reveals that the governance of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), facilitated by remote sensing, fosters an audit culture characterized by strict control and compliance. The emphasis on mapping, quantifying, and representing agriculture underpins this governance model and drives further technological advancements. However, participants highlight the shortcomings of remote sensing technologies in effectively controlling farming practices. By integrating theories of bureaucracy and governance with a critical perspective on techno-utopianism, we examine these dynamics. Our findings indicate that the current application of remote sensing within the CAP is constrained not only by technical limitations but also by the existing governance framework. The push for quantification leads respondents to advocate for the further adoption of technical innovations to enhance control over agriculture. In conclusion, we suggest that a policy shift is necessary to break free from this technology trap.

In response to the need for exploring transformative innovation policy (TIP) implementation dynamics across sectors and contexts, this paper examines the emergence of TIP in the Chilean agri-food sector. Our findings indicate that TIP has been developing in recent years, primarily in high-level policy discourses, while implementation efforts and the coordination of concrete instrument mixes lag behind. Contextual factors strongly influence TIP development, which include (1) the organization of public administration, (2) national political dynamics, (3) national policy cultures, and (4) geographical contexts. Importantly, our work emphasizes the need for developing policy capabilities and underscores the significant role of proto-institutions in supporting TIP development, through innovation system coordination, science-policy advice, fostering cross-sectoral collaboration, multiactor engagement, and learning and experimentation. Better considering policy contexts as the starting point for developing TIP could advance its implementation and contribute to a broader understanding of TIP dynamics.

One largely neglected focus in the analysis of mission-oriented innovation policies is mission cocreation between stakeholder groups advocating different solution directions. In this paper, we introduce the innovation management concept of ambidexterity to study how mission cocreation in different mission arenas is influenced by actors aiming to continue existing innovation pathways (exploitative innovation) and actors advocating alternative pathways (explorative innovation). Our case study on the Dutch circular agriculture mission highlights how an initial top-down strategy development was dominated by exploitative forces, despite ambitions to secure broad stakeholder participation. Government-led efforts to still engage exploration-minded actors, and restore ambidexterity, were hampered by potential contributors feeling excluded from the policy process. These findings underline the risk that openness of missions, required for broad stakeholder involvement, might also reinforce preexisting contestation and innovation pathways. Overall, our findings demonstrate a trade-off between maximizing efficiency and speed versus obtaining novel perspectives and wide societal legitimacy.

Climate change poses a risk to agricultural activity. Understanding farmers' behaviors is increasingly important for managing climate risks and improving their adaptive capacity. This study aims to identify the key risk-related drivers influencing several adaptation and mitigation strategies by adopting various Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies to reduce climate change vulnerability. We investigate the interrelated nature of the adoption of CSA technologies related to soil fertility, soil conservation, agroforestry, agro-advisory apps, and alternative coffee farming practices. To explore the role of the perceived risks related to CSA technology adoption, we constructed an extended model that combines protection motivation theory, perceived farmers' adoption risks and social and demographic determinants. We collected empirical data from 519 coffee farmers in Costa Rica and analyzed the data through a multivariate probit technique. The analysis reveals how the influence of perceived climate risks severity, perceived vulnerability, response efficacy, self-efficacy, and perceived cost changes according to the CSA technology. As for the perceived adoption risks, we show that the adoption likelihood of CSA technologies focused on mitigation decreases with increasing perceived adoption risk. Other determinants, such as the number of coffee buyers and the farmers' membership in an organization, steer the adoption of soil fertility practices, agroforestry, and agro-advisory mobile apps. Main theoretical implications include the integration of the CSA adoption risk-related perceptions to the protection motivation theory, since it reflects on farmers' fear of potential losses or additional costs associated with implementing these practices. The finding gives a nuanced explanation of farmers' decisions under pressing climate change threats. Practical implications for increasing CSA adoption are that CSA promotion programs must consider that farmers see CSA technologies as interrelated in their adoption decisions, meaning that more fruitful synergies could be promoted by acknowledging the bundled adoption of multiple CSA technologies. Thus, promoting a mix of CSA technologies and practices is essential for achieving resilience while increasing productivity.

Sustainable Public Food Procurement (SPFP) is gaining recognition for its potential to improve the sustainability of food systems and promote healthier diets. However, SPFP faces various challenges, including coordination issues, actor dynamics, infrastructure limitations, unsustainable habits, and institutional resistance, among others. Drawing upon insights from the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions and the X-curve model on transition dynamics, this study investigates the role of transition intermediaries in facilitating SPFP-induced transformations in food systems. Focusing on four case studies in Spain, we identify common barriers encountered in SPFP and analyse how distinct types of transition intermediaries contribute individually and collectively to address these challenges. Additionally, we explore how intermediary networks evolve throughout different phases of the transition process. Our findings reveal that SPFP barriers are systemic and interconnected, emphasizing the necessity of collective intermediation to overcome these obstacles. Furthermore, our results reveal how collective intermediation is orchestrated by pivotal intermediaries who mobilize diverse transition intermediaries, shaping multiple transition pathways. These intermediaries operate at both food system regimes and niches, challenging the conventional notion that transformative change can only originate from niche efforts. Lastly, we highlight the dynamic and flexible nature of intermediation in SPFP transitions, underscoring the importance of adaptability in strategies as these transitions evolve over time. Practical implications include the need for context-specific, adaptive approaches and strategies that leverage intermediary diversity. This research offers insights for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars into SPFP and broader transitions towards food systems transformation, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of these transition processes.

Literature on mission-specific innovation systems (MIS) highlights the crucial role of directionality when achieving sustainability transitions, while diversity literature emphasizes the need to keep diverse directions open. Like directionality, diversity is created by innovation system actors to tackle the complex and uncertain nature of transitions. While these two literature strands are presented largely independent of one another, both are deemed necessary to achieve sociotechnical transitions. We thus aim to uncover how diversity and directionality unfold in parallel in a MIS. We conduct a qualitative single-case study of the Wageningen alternative protein ecosystem to provide insights into the types of sociotechnological trajectories actors pursue and how different selection environments shape the development of each solution. We observe a mission exhibiting a clear direction toward (meat) substitutes. Underlying this mission, diversity is visible. We propose that the interplay between diversity and directionality in a MIS can be best understood by distinguishing two different sociotechnical "levels" in which they play out: the levels of transition paths ("first-order" directionality) and search directions ("second-order" directionality). We therefore call for a more nuanced understanding of the role of diversity and directionality in transitions.

Food systems transformations require coherent policies and improved understandings of the drivers and institutional dynamics that shape (un)sustainable food systems outcomes. In this paper, we introduce the Chilean National Organic Agriculture Law as a case of a policy process seeking to institutionalize a recognized pathway towards more sustainable food systems. Drawing from institutional theory we make visible multiple, and at times competing, logics (i.e., values, assumptions and practices) of different actors implicated in organic agriculture in Chile. More specifically, our findings identify five main institutional transformative logics underpinning the interests and actions of organic actors. However, we find that the Law was not motivated by these logics and did not advance them. Rather, the Law was designed to support a market niche targeted to elite consumers and to reinforce agricultural exports. As a result, the Law constrains rather than enables the practice of organic agriculture and access to organic food by consumers, especially at the domestic level. We note that attention to institutional logics in the analysis of food systems, and specifically food system transformation, is relevant to more comprehensive assessments of the transformational potential of food systems policies. We conclude that there is a need to further consider and make visible the way in which different drivers (i.e., laws) are constituted through and by diverse, and often competing, institutional logics.

CONTEXT: Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to address climate change, climate variability, and food security while sustaining productivity. The literature on acceptance and adoption of CSA technologies recognizes the importance of the policy environment in shaping farmers' decisions, particularly the policy mix, including economic, regulatory, and information instruments to stimulate CSA acceptance. Behavioral models have been used to better explain CSA acceptance, however, only a few studies integrate farmers' behavioral drivers and their policy mix appraisal, which in combination, are important determinants for the successful acceptance of CSA. OBJECTIVE: This paper proposes a model that integrates behavioral drivers and policy mix appraisal influencing the acceptance of CSA technologies. We aim to examine how farmers' behavioral drivers and their appraisal of the policy environment influence the acceptance of CSA technologies and practices. METHODS: We studied the Costa Rican coffee sector and conducted 523 surveys with coffee farmers and two focus groups with experts, extension agents, and cooperatives. An ordered probit model was used to identify factors explaining CSA acceptance.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that besides the influence of behavioral drivers, policy consistency and comprehensiveness and the type of instrument targeting farmers' behaviors play an important role in explaining CSA acceptance. Our results suggest that a positive appraisal of policy consistency and comprehensiveness are important for increasing farmers' acceptance of CSA and sustainable practices. This deepens earlier thinking on "policy packages" effectiveness by showing that the farmers' appraisal of the overall policy mix influences their decisions to engage with CSA. SIGNIFICANCE: Our study shows the importance of considering system context effects (policy environment) on farmers' decision-making. Since the integration of behavioral drivers and the appraisal of the policy mix characteristics is relatively underexplored for CSA, our empirical results may help to unravel farmers' decisionmaking processes. Thus, it can be used for rethinking and adjusting policy interventions toward more balanced and comprehensive policy mixes, as it enables feedback from policy implementation and can further induce policy learning.

Monitoring systems that incentivize, track and verify compliance with social and environmental standards are widespread in food systems. In particular, digital monitoring approaches using remote sensing, machine learning, big data, smartphones, platforms and blockchain are proliferating. The increasing use and availability of these technologies put us at a critical juncture to leverage these innovations for enhanced transparency, fairness and open access, rather than descending into a dystopian landscape of digital surveillance and division perpetuated by a powerful few. Here we discuss opportunities and risks, and highlight research gaps linked to the ongoing digitalization of monitoring approaches.

The multi-actor approach in the EU's Horizon 2020 program has seen use across a large number of research projects. However, there remain questions about the extent and depth of participation that is achieved in these research projects, and how it may enable joint production of scientific theory next to readily applicable practical knowledge. This article aims to explore the latter question by focusing on the potential of such co-theorising, understood as the involvement of stakeholders in producing scientific outputs. We analyse how researchers involved in this research project view the participation of stakeholders, how they deal with tensions in participation, and how these tensions are resolved. Through 17 semi-structured interviews with researchers involved in the project's Living Labs we show that there are tensions between the interests of stakeholders, the project requirements and research interests. The findings indicate that a focus on including the stakeholders in theorising comes at a cost of practical relevance to the stakeholder. To safeguard the practical relevance of participation, researchers choose to exclude discussion on theory and theoretical concepts from the living labs. This is despite an initial belief that co-theorising and the further participation of stakeholders in producing scientific outputs holds merit. Hence, researchers purposefully prioritize practical relevance to stakeholders, thereby reducing the potential for co-theorising. The fact that theories already need to be defined in a proposal stage and project's limit scope for redefinition of core concepts, make that advancing theory together with stakeholders is not well accommodated for in Horizon 2020. This also bears relevance for the Horizon Europe program which follows a similar approach.

Este artículo explora las implicancias de la incorporación de sistemas de ordeña automatizados en las prácticas laborales de trabajadores de lecherías del sur de Chile, a través de una investigación cualitativa y transversal. El trabajo de campo consistió en observaciones en terreno y entrevistas semiestructuradas a productores y trabajadores ubicados en las regiones de Los Ríos y Los Lagos, de Chile. Los principales cambios observados desde la perspectiva de los productores son transformaciones en la distribución del tiempo, en el lugar de trabajo y en la administración del personal agrícola. En el caso de los trabajadores, se observaron cambios en las rutinas de trabajo, las labores y las habilidades, que respectivamente se intensifican, cambian y/o se pierden. En síntesis, las principales implicancias observadas, para productores y trabajadores, tienen relación con la organización del trabajo en las lecherías, las transformaciones en las habilidades laborales y el sentido y significado del trabajo agrícola luego de su inserción.

AgriFoodTech start-ups are coming to be seen as relevant players in the debate around and reality of the transformation of food systems, especially in view of emerging or already-established novel technologies (such as Artifical Intelligence, Sensors, Precision Fermentation, Robotics, Nanotechnologies, Genomics) that constitute Agriculture 4.0 and Food 4.0. However, so far, there have only been limited studies of this phenomena, which are scattered across disciplines, with no comprehensive overview of the state of the art and outlook for future research. In this paper, we argue that AgriFoodTech start-up ecosystems should receive more attention by researchers and policy makers as a relatively new, and potentially transformative, component of agrifood innovation systems, which adopt a narrative of offering a solution to the global challenges of sustainability and food security. To this end we review the extant literature and provide a brief overview of this emerging field of study, in which we sketch what constitutes an AgriFoodTech start-up, the start-up ecosystems from which they often emerge and show the potentials and pitfalls of the contribution of AgriFoodTech start-ups to food security and food systems transformation. In order to spur further research in this area, we outline four main lines for a research agenda: 1) the global geography of AgriFoodTech start-up ecosystems; 2) the role of AgriFoodTech start-ups in different food system transformation pathways and resolving food security challenges; 3) the effect of AgriFoodTech start-ups on agrifood innovation, and; 4) the influence of public policies on AgriFoodTech start-up ecosystems.

Transformative innovation policies are gaining currency worldwide, but have been mainly studied in a Global North context and in the energy sector. This paper focuses empirically on Costa Rica's Climate Smart Agriculture policy mix. It addresses key knowledge gaps on the dynamics of transformative policy development in the agrifood sector in a Global South policy context. Results show Costa Rica's policy mix's transformative potential was inhibited by weak implementation capacity and internal and external incoherence between sectors and governance levels, leading to tensions resulting from policy-element interactions such as conflicting goals and interventions with overlapping purposes. The broader implication for theory and practice is that successful transformative policy mixes require close scrutiny of both the balance of the mix and how to fundamentally transform the mix. This includes paying more attention to the phasing out of legacy policy instruments and to how countries’ particular institutional contexts and policy cultures influence transformative policymaking and implementation.

Precision agriculture is often seen as disembodied and placeless, promised to either bring about a fourth agricultural revolution or as the start of dystopian rural futures, where farmers and their knowledge will be replaced by machines. A growing body of literature shows more nuanced ways of working with precision agriculture. This illustrates the need to investigate how, and under which conditions, precision agriculture is integrated and internalised by farmers. Based on 25 in‐depth interviews with male Dutch crop farmers, contractors, researchers, and ag‐tech developers, we develop the concept of the cyborg farmer, who embodies the use of precision technology while maintaining an intimate relationship with agro‐ecological context. This approach challenges the mind–body dichotomy in that the cognitive is not understood as primary, as emotions and the materiality of the body are taken seriously. This perspective emphasises the importance of embodied knowledge in how farmers interpret precision agriculture data. Our findings highlight the productive tension between data‐driven elements of precision agriculture and the embodied and intuitive understanding of agro‐ecological context. This productive tension consists of the successful integration of different forms of knowledge by the cyborg farmer, where embodied sense‐making and precision agriculture data are integrated into the formation of useable knowledge. The cyborg farmer maintains farmer agency and resists the dominance of algorithmic rationality over other forms of knowledge .