ICT for agriculture, rural development and environment: Where we are? Where we will go?

Abstract

The book is composed of contribution from many authors. It doesn’t cover all the past and current research projects. It presents the vision of limited number of authors. The book demonstrates the development of ICT for agriculture, rural development, food and environment mainly in the last decade. It showed rapid roll out of infrastructure on one side, but also slower take up on new applications on the other side. The adoption of new solutions by rural communities is a problem until now. We see important to make better link between different groups of scientists but also between scientists, policymakers and developers. If research results will be transferred into innovation, research will be successful. To guarantee the sustainability of research results is one of the challenges for the next period. The book collects different visions of future for farming sector and rural regions. It is clear that the rural regions will be under strong pressure in the next period and ICT, knowledge management and research have to play the key role. We would like to use the book as a basis for further discussion and intensive exchange of experiences and research results. The information collected in this book will be a basis for Strategic research Agenda of the agriXchange project.