Digitalization in agriculture and the food industry

The digital transformation does not stop at the most traditional of our economic sectors. Many Bavarian farmers are very open to new technologies. At the same time, there is uncertainty about which investments in digital technologies are worthwhile and which change processes are inevitable. This is reason enough to take a closer look at the opportunities and challenges that digitization brings with it in agriculture and the food industry. A number of developments are taking place in a similar way in all sectors and sectors of the economy, but at different times and at different speeds. This also applies, for example, to the structural changes in the world of work due to increasing automation and the constant improvements in artificial intelligence or to the growing importance of platform markets. Here, everyone can benefit from thinking outside the box. Digitalization ensures precision and planning security. However, each industry also has its own special features and is being changed in its own way by digitization. In agriculture, a special feature is that it is always about living organisms, which limits predictability. Nevertheless, the new possibilities of data collection and evaluation open up completely new insights and enable much higher precision in management. In the food industry, it is above all the changing expectations of consumers that create pressure for change. With our present study – a decoupling from the vbw study New Value Creation through Digitization – we want to show how digitization is currently and in the near future influencing the agriculture and food industry, and what opportunities it still offers our companies. The Future Council of the Bavarian Economy has derived concrete recommendations for action from the overall view of trends, potentials and obstacles across all industries and sectors ( New value creation through digitization – analysis and recommendations for action ), which must now be implemented in order to realize additional value creation through digitization in Bavaria and Germany.