At FAO’s Global Conference on Smart Farming, WFO highlighted that the real challenge is no longer whether technology works, but whether all farmers can access the full system needed to make it work in practice.

Smart farming technology already works. The challenge is ensuring it works for everyone. Speaking at the FAO Global Conference on Smart Farming, WFO Secretary General Dr Andrea Porro argued that the real divide is no longer technological but economic: who can access the connectivity, digital skills, finance and laboratory services needed to make smart farming deliver in practice.

If innovation is scaled only where capital already exists, the digital divide will not close. It will harden.

That message ran through the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO)‘s participation across the conference, held at FAO Headquarters in Rome from 1 to 3 July: technology must serve farmers, not the other way round. Smart farming must be farmer-driven, bottom-up and science-based: rooted in farmers’ realities on the ground, while connected to sound scientific evidence.

Throughout the conference, WFO stressed that farmers’ organisations are the bridge between innovation and adoption. By providing trusted advisory services, digital skills and local knowledge, they help turn technological potential into practical solutions that work on the ground.

Governance for Inclusive Smart Farming

Governance was the first test. Dr Porro opened with a message that recurred throughout the conference: farmers are data owners and decision-makers, not just data sources. From there, he emphasised that an enabling environment for digital agriculture depends on four pillars working together: connectivity, skills, finance and fair data rules.

He also stressed that farmers are economic actors first: they farm for a living and cannot be expected to carry the cost of digital transformation without support or compensation. Data quality has a cost, he noted, and someone must pay for data collection, validation and entry if farmers are expected to provide reliable information.

Governance stays on paper, he said, until financing reaches field level, since farmers cannot be expected to guarantee data quality without the resources to collect and validate it. For WFO, this also raises a fundamental question: who owns farm-generated data, who uses it, and who benefits from the value it creates?

Farm-generated data is not only business information: farms are also homes for farmers and their families, which makes privacy protection central to any fair data governance framework.

He pointed to farmers’ organisations as the channel best placed to close that gap, citing KENAFF’s Farm Pass in Kenya, which already serves over 700,000 farmers with digital payments, credit, insurance and AI-based advisory; GFA’s Agronavti platform in Georgia, which adapts AI-powered irrigation advice to local conditions; and Canada’s CFA Agri-Data Leadership Programme, which strengthens farmers’ capacity to govern their own data.

Together, these examples illustrate a point WFO repeatedly made throughout the conference: farmers’ organisations are not only the last mile for digital adoption, but also the first mile where digital solutions meet farmers’ realities. Investing in and through them is the most direct way to turn smart farming from a pilot into a daily reality for farmers.

Smart Farming for Food Safety

On food safety, Dr Porro’s starting point was another message that resounded throughout the conference: technologies can only deliver their potential if they are accessible, trusted and useful at farm level.

Farmers are the first guardians of food safety, not the last party to be checked, because safety begins upstream, in the soil, the water and the practices in the field.

©FAO / Matteo Sala

Digital traceability has real value where it works. It simplifies compliance, audits and certification, reduces fraud and delays, opens access to regulated markets, and transforms producers from subjects of inspection into partners in food safety.

But traceability has clear limits. It makes information verifiable; it does not detect hazards. That remains the role of laboratories.

Where laboratory access is limited, risks such as mycotoxins or microbial contamination can remain undetected regardless of how advanced the traceability system is. For WFO, food safety only improves at farm level when digital tools are paired with affordable testing, public incentives, and capacity building. Otherwise, traceability certifies where food came from, not whether it is safe.

Smart Farming for Climate Resilience

Resilience brought the debate back to the gap between what smart farming can do and what farmers actually experience on the ground. As Dr Porro put it, the real question is not whether smart farming works. It does where it reaches. The question is why it does not reach further. Smart farming is not defined by the sophistication of technology but by its usefulness to farmers.

At the same time, WFO highlighted barriers that continue to limit adoption across regions: high costs, weak connectivity, lack of relevance and trust, limited digital and data literacy, and fragmented advisory, financial, and technology systems.

©FAO

Addressing these barriers is at the core of GreenFit, the Horizon Europe-funded project in which WFO is involved. It aims to accelerate the uptake of climate-smart technologies by identifying the socio-economic, behavioural, cultural and technical factors that prevent farmers from adopting these solutions, and by co-developing scalable, farmer-centred solutions through value-chain partnerships, digital tools, and practical field implementation.

As Dr Porro recalled, early engagement under the project shows that only around 25% of the farmers involved had a good understanding of climate-smart farming and the technologies associated with it.

A 2025 WFO–AgMission consultation found that 86% of young producers consider inadequate digital infrastructure a major obstacle to accessing new market opportunities.

Technology does not build resilience. Farmers do, when they have the knowledge, tools, institutional support and policy environment they need to act. For WFO, this means putting farmers’ organisations at the centre of smart farming deployment, not as passive recipients of technology, but as co-designers, co-deliverers and co-owners of solutions.

The way forward

Closing the conference, Dr Porro stressed that the debate is no longer about whether smart farming works, but about who it reaches and who is left out. The way forward is clear: “Technology can lift a great deal of weight from farmers’ shoulders, but only if it reaches them. The structural change we envision is that farmer organisations must be recognised and resourced as the institutional backbone of smart farming deployment, not as passive recipients of technology, but as co-designers, co-deliverers, and co-owners of the solutions.”

© FAO / James Morgan

This message was also echoed in the closing remarks by Beth Bechdol, FAO Deputy Director-General, who called on farmer organisations and farmers themselves to be “the co-designers of smart farming tools“, not simply the recipients of solutions developed for them.

WFO’s contribution to the conference reflects its Policy on Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, adopted by the General Assembly in June 2025, and its 2022 Policy on Innovation, both of which place farmers’ data ownership, decision-making power and participation at the centre of digital transformation in agriculture.