The Government of Bangladesh deployed SMART patrolling in the Sundarbans – the world’s largest mangrove forest – in September 2017. Although guidelines were developed, they did not cover plain land forest or hill forest monitoring in the country. FAO in partnership with the Bangladesh Forest Department and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), developed a SMART patrolling toolkit for these types of forest. The toolkit has been piloted in four protected areas of Cox’s Bazar and will be used for management of hill and plain land forest across Bangladesh.It will guide the use on CyberTracker/Android phone for real-time monitoring of hill and plain land forests across the country. The toolkit will be useful for law enforcement, monitoring threats, forest and wildlife monitoring, and public awareness generation.

CGIAR’s digital extension services bridge the gap between the development and the adoption of new climate change adaptation strategies. These services include new ways to disperse information on rainfed systems of agriculture, nutrition, pest control, new crop varieties, crop management practices, and more.

Approximately 4.9 billion people – or 63 per cent of the world’s population – are using the Internet in 2021[1]. This represents an increase of 17 per cent since 2019, with 782 million people estimated to have come online during that period. Of the 2.9 billion people offline, 96 per cent live in developing countries.

These are just some of the insights that can be found in the 2021 edition of Facts and Figures, ITU’s annual global assessment of digital connectivity. It features estimates for key connectivity indicators for the world, global regions, and several country groupings, including the UN-designated Least Developed Countries.

The field of research on agricultural and rural extension and education, also referred to as advisory services and intermediaries, has always engaged with different aspects of the spaces in which agricultural producers (farmers, growers, ranchers) are situated and operate. In this editorial, I will reflect on the elements and environments which jointly constitute and shape the farm (Darnhofer 2020) and their connection with extension and advisory services in the digital age, opening up new digital and virtual spaces. Extension and advisory services receive ample consideration in current debates on digitalization and digital transformation of the agrifood sector, and are an important focus of attention for agriculture and food systems research, practice and policy (Ehlers, Huber, and Finger 2021; Ingram and Maye 2020; Klerkx 2020). In what follows, I will elaborate on some digital and virtual spaces as sites of extension and advisory services research, to progress the field of study for which The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension serves as a publication outlet.

Although the public extension system in India is known to be one of the largest in the world, it still lacks coordinated effort in managing the links between research, extension, and farmers, resulting in non-uniform distribution of agricultural knowledge and technology. A vast majority of the population earning their livelihood through agriculture remain small and marginal farmers. Lack of computerized networks in agricultural extension departments, inadequate skilled manpower for disseminating agricultural information, and increasingly diverse needs of farmers across the Indian sub-continent pose hurdles in effective information transfer to the farming community. The use of information and communication technology (ICT) tools exerts a positive impact on agriculture worldwide by aiding speedy and effective dissemination of agricultural information. Increased awareness of modern ICT tools and their usage will contribute substantially to strengthening the extension network and expand its scope. This study explored the ICT preferences of personnel from agricultural extension organizations employed in public extension organizations in the north-eastern region of India. It found that electronic media is ranked below the conventional extension contact modes of print media and personalized contact regarding its use for disseminating agricultural information by the extension personnel. Demographic characteristics of the personnel from agricultural extension organizations such as sex, age, education, specialization, designation, and work experience were significantly associated with the pattern of ICT use specifically experience with ICT, frequency of use, training, and voluntary use.

This study investigates the hybrid informational governance arrangements involved in the provision of ICT-enabled Weather Information Services (WIS) for farming in Ghana. Farmers and organizations providing WIS were interviewed. Findings show that multiple technologies are used by combinations of government, business, and civil society organizations to provide various WIS for farming. The ICT has facilitated the creation of different hybrid informational governance arrangements, categorized as multiplicity, intertwinement, and coalescence, which permits flows of WIS across scales, from international non-state organizations to farming communities, often by-passing national and district-level government organizations. Government organizations remain key players in the provision of WIS.

The digital agriculture revolution holds a promise to build an agriculture and food system that is efficient, environmentally sustainable, and equitable, one that can help deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. Unlike past technological revolutions in agriculture, which began on farms, the current revolution is being sparked at multiple points along the agrifood value chain. The change is driven by the ability to collect, use, and analyze massive amounts of machine-readable data about practically every aspect of the value chain, and by the emergence of digital platforms disrupting existing business models. All this allows for drastically reduced transaction costs and pervasive information asymmetries that plague the agrifood system. The success of the digital transformation, however, is not guaranteed as the risks it brings are numerous, including those related to data governance and inadequate competition within and between digital platforms. What’s Cooking: Digital Transformation of the Agrifood System investigates how digital technologies can accelerate the transformation of the agrifood system by increasing efficiency on the farm; improving farmers’ access to output, input, and financial markets; strengthening quality control and traceability; and improving the design and delivery of agriculture policies. It also identifies a key role for the public sector in maximizing the benefits of this process while minimizing its risks, through enabling an innovation ecosystem featuring open datasets, digital platforms, digital entrepreneurship, digital payment systems, and digital skills and encouraging equitable technology adoption.

This report presents and reflects on the opportunities that new technological developments related to automation and precision agriculture (e.g. robotics) can offer to agriculture in developing countries. These technologies are mainly targeted to support farmers that struggle with the cost of labour when harvesting crops and to tackle the declining availability of manpower for general cropping operations. This report also explores the possible applications of agricultural technology, presents the current trends and discusses some of the principle challenges to successful adoption for sustainable agricultural mechanization in developing countries.

The papers in this two-part special issue examine from a range of perspectives the challenges and opportunities in tracking and demonstrating the impact of managing knowledge both inside the walls (in organizations) and outside the walls (in the broader development context). Due to the high number of papers selected, they were divided into two issues, based on their completion dates. We would like to thank all Guest Editors who reviewed and provided feedback on the abstracts and papers, as well as other colleagues who kindly agreed to peer review papers and provide feedback to the authors. We would also like to thank the contributing authors for their papers and for their patience –it has taken considerably longer than we had anticipated to finalize this issue. Finally, we would like to recognize the dedication and hard work of the Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Cummings. It has been a pleasure to work with her on this issue and we look forward to contributing to and supporting the Journal well into the future as members of the team of Senior Editors.