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1. Introduction
Digital technology is transforming the food supply chain from farm to fork. In the past few years, we have seen information technology developing rapidly and reshaping the food industry. In the upstream farmers can use the remote sensing to grow; robotics along with other labor-saving technologies began to show their potentials in harvesting as well as processing. In the downstream, food retail is rapidly changing due to e-commerce and food delivery services. Tech giants gather massive information of transaction and production and use artificial intelligence to assist decision making while logistics firms started to adopt block chain technology to facilitate better tracing of products.
The technological changes in agricultural and food sector drives much research in technology and agricultural economics about how people grow, process, ship and sell agricultural products. Despite the rapid growth of adoption of digital technologies, the literature on the economics of the cause and impact of adopting such technologies is far lagging behind the practice in the agricultural sector. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments of new digital technologies and the economics behind the adoption of such technologies. We document some important impacts of digital agriculture on food supply chain, research trend, emphasis and implications for future research.
To provide a comprehensive synthesis of how digital technologies reshape agriculture, we adopt a supply chain point of view to categorize the different technologies: what are the important digital technologies being adopted along the supply chain from production to processing, from logistics to retail in food and agricultural sector. For example, remote sensing brings new detailed data to producers cheaply, and artificial intelligence can make help people make decisions in time. Artificial intelligence and robotics can also improve the automation of food assembly, and this can lower the cost and control negative impact on workers and production from the pandemic. Meanwhile, people can order agricultural products online, firms can target potential customers according to data and algorithm, and this gives birth to new business models, like food delivery. Lastly, logistics connects all the economic activities above, the Internet of Things and block chain can make people get fresh and safe food. In section 2, background of digital agriculture is discussed. We will show how...