Next-Gen Smart Farming presents a thorough, evidence-based assessment of using emerging physical and computerized systems designed to enhance agricultural efficiency. It balances demonstrated benefits with a clear articulation of potential risks. The work surveys the entire pipeline, from sensing technologies and data collection to artificial intelligence and machine learning, spatial analysis, decision modeling, and automation. It highlights how these technologies can strengthen crop monitoring, yield forecasting, and farm management, while it also examines governance, equity, and ethical considerations essential for responsible deployment. Economic, environmental, and social impacts are analyzed, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating trade-offs and outcomes in real-world contexts. Framed as an interdisciplinary resource, the volume equips researchers, industry practitioners, extension specialists, and policymakers with practical methodologies, metrics, and narratives needed to implement scalable digital agriculture solutions that improve productivity, resilience, and sustainability across diverse real-world settings.
Annamaria Castrignanò, formerly director of research at Council for Agricultural Research and Economics in Bari (Italy) and full professor of geostatistics at the G. D'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). She is currently a senior researcher at the IREA Center of the National Research Council (CNR). She has been actively involved in the discipline of pedometrics and digital soil mapping for many years. Her knowledge and expertise in geostatistics and statistics has been exemplified in several oral presentations in International conferences and peer-refereed journal articles (she has published more than 300 papers). She has published also as co-editor of books of Elsevier, Springer, CRC Press regarding the application of geostatistics to pedology, environmental monitoring and smart farming. She has been the scientific leader of national and international projects aimed at the application of precision farming to the cultivation of durum wheat and tomato in Southern Italy and at the use of proximal and remote sensing in agriculture. She has been giving several basic and advanced courses on geostatistics to national and international PhD students and researchers in Italy and abroad. She is currently involved in the implementation of multivariate geostatistical techniques of data fusion with change of support using proximal and remote sensors.
Lucio Colizzi is currently a Researcher and lecturer at the University of Bari. He graduated in Computer Engineering from the University of Salento. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bari, where his research focused on managing healthcare and clinical processes. Since 2001, he has been the Computer Engineering Department Director at CETMA (European Research Centre for Technology, Design and Materials), where he coordinated several industrial research projects. He is founder of SmartEducationLab, a research spin-off startup operating in digital manufacturing, IoT, process digitization, and simulation fields.
He is the author of a European patent in the field of mechatronics and several scientific publications. His areas of expertise include ICT technologies in smart agriculture, Industry 4.0, cultural heritage and healthcare. He lectures in digital supply chain, information system and database design, 3D modeling, open-source IoT development, coding, and cooperative systems.
Prof. Raj Khosla, former Head of the Agronomy Department at Kansas State University, is a globally recognized authority on Precision Agriculture. He has been engaged in precision agriculture since inception and has made significant contributions in the development and spread of Precision Agriculture worldwide. He is the Founder and Past-President of the International Society of Precision Agriculture. Prof. Khosla’s research specializes in harnessing spatial and temporal heterogeneity in managed agro-ecosystems and translating those into better decision models. His group has extensively used remote sensing and other geo-spatial tools to enhance production, resource use efficiency, profitability, and sustainability of managed agro-ecosystems. He has co-authored over 100 refereed publications and has been invited globally to over 30 countries.
Prof. Khosla is the Fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science; Fellow of American Society of Agronomy; Fellow of Soil Science Society of America; Fellow of Crop Science Society of America, Fellow of Soil and Water Conservation Society and Honorary Life Fellow of International Society of Precision Agriculture.
Dr. Spyros Fountas is Professor in Precision Agriculture at the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece. He is currently Editor-in-Chief in the ELSEVIER journal “Smart Agricultural Technology”. He holds an MSc from Cranfield University in the UK in Information Technology, and PhD from Copenhagen University, Denmark in Systems Analysis on Precision Agriculture. He was Visiting Scholar at the Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University in the USA. He has been Keynote speaker in various international Conferences and Fairs. He has participated in more than 40 European funded H2020 projects, where he has been coordinator in 8 projects related to the application and evaluation of new technologies in agriculture. He has published more than 200 papers, including peer-review journal, conference papers and book chapters
