Up-skilling and re-skilling for digital agriculture in Romanian big crop farms : exploratory considerations

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to elevate the interest in the academic, professional and policy making circles to the need of a large-scale re-skilling and up-skilling effort for the management and the workforce in the Romanian farms in light of the large-scale deployment of the Agriculture 4.0 technologies. The Romanian agricultural sector is a major contributor to the EU agricultural output and the aim of such an effort would be to secure and enhance its competitiveness by future proofing the performance and sustainability of the Romanian farms in the context of yield growth imperative, sustainable exploitation of land and water resources and efficient and fast decision making enabled by digitalization. A review of the most influential papers and the bibliometric mapping (using VOSviewer) of Web of Science articles on digital agriculture was enriched with several expert interviews with executives involved in the deployment of digital technologies to Romanian farmers. The literature review illustrated that like in the case of Industry 4.0, Agriculture 4.0 requires training and deployment of new skills. Expert interviews added extra perspectives coming from practitioners and highlighted the fact that these new skills are needed at all levels of work happening in the farm. The digitalization of the agriculture is a structural change that will happen even if adoption rates seem still slow and it will affect all actors in the farm from owners/managers to operators giving a very important role to agricultural experts, engineers, and financial planners. It is the hope of this article to bring an academic support to the conversation about the skills needed for Agriculture 4.0 and induce operationalization of large scale grassroot activities needed for the migration of today’s agricultural practitioners to digital technologies.