Farmtopia Sustainable Collaborative Business Model Innovation: Farmtopia’s 7th Practice Abstract
This is the seventh Practice Abstract developed in the scope of the Farmtopia project, authored by Federica Ciccullo, Ernst Johannes Prosman, Sandra Cesari de Maria, Filippo Renga, and Raffaella Cagliano from POLIMI.
Small and medium farmers face significant barriers to adopting Agricultural Digital Solutions (ADSs), including high investment costs, low interoperability with other technologies, and a lack of trust. Current business models often favor large-scale farms, exacerbating power imbalances and limiting smaller farms’ ability to benefit from ADSs. This limits the potential for democratizing technology adoption and achieving broader sustainability goals in the agricultural sector. Sustainable Collaborative Business Models (SCBM) offer a promising approach to overcome these barriers by fostering collaboration between farmers, technology providers, and other stakeholders to jointly create and capture value.
Solution
Through the Farmtopia project, we explored how SCBM can address behavioral, technological, and financial challenges that small farmers face in adopting ADSs. Using interviews, workshops, and structured questionnaires, we identified key interventions and new SCBM patterns tailored to small farms. Such interventions are specific for the phase of the process: namely, ADSs development, ADSs adoption and SCBM consolidation. All phases are based on the involvement of farmers, as this approach empowers them to become active participants in a broader ecosystem, aligning interests and addressing challenges specific to their needs.
In the ADSs development phase, interventions include creating flexible applications of ADSs to suit different farm sizes, ensuring integration of ADSs with existing systems and promoting data-sharing mechanisms. User-friendliness is particularly emphasized to encourage adoption, alongside farmers’ autonomy in decision-making.
During the ADSs adoption phase, the SCBM process suggests strengthening dissemination through intermediaries such as ambassador farmers, workshops, and communication campaigns in order to build trust in the technology. Other interventions include facilitating access to subsidies and obtaining premium prices for sustainable practices.
To reduce financial risks in the consolidation phase, the SCBM process suggests considering flexible pricing options (e.g., freemium or pay-per-use), hardware and software as-a-service, or other solutions such as external partners financing ADSs to reduce the financial burden on farmers.
Benefits
Applying the SCBM approach brings to the following key benefits: better integration of ADSs with existing solutions, more user-friendly and farmers-oriented technologies, lower investment costs and greater affordability of ADSs, higher investment capacity of farmers, data valorization and supply chain optimisation.
Practical Implementation
To successfully implement the SCBM process, the following actions must be ensured: i) fostering collaboration among technology providers, farmers and other supply chain actors to co-design ADSs and explore SCBM opportunities; ii) leveraging existing networks, especially farmers’ associations and digital innovation hubs, that can facilitate the SCBM development and ADSs adoption; iii) enhancing digital literacy with training sessions to improve understanding and confidence in using ADSs; iv) conceiving value capture opportunities based on flexible pricing schemes and, where possible, leverage on data valorization to lower the costs, and v) advocating for policy support as policymakers should create incentives for adopting ADSs tailored to small farms and establishing SCBM approaches.
You can find another nine Practice Abstracts in our next blog posts under the Newsroom section!