Public Perceptions of Digital Farming Technologies and Digital Futures

Digital technologies are changing agricultural production systems and will characterize agriculture in the future. Autonomous machines (robots), for example, strongly deviate from traditional agricultural images and farming practices. The main interest of this project is to analyze and better understand society’s attitudes toward the increasing digitalization in agriculture. This project is part of the PhenoRob Excellence Cluster at the University of Bonn.

More specifically, this project aims at:

(1) Exploring what citizens know about digitization and automation in agriculture and how they perceive current developments,
(2) outlining scenarios of what agriculture, especially crop farming, could look like in the future and
(3) combining these pieces of informations into an overall picture with the experiences from the practical development of machines and models in the PhenoRob project and farmers' perspectives regarding new technologies.

Results may help to improve public communication around new digital farming technologies.

Methodology

• Online surveys and experiments with German citizens
• Multivariate statistical analysis methods