Digital Agriculture and Forestry Futures for Policymakers: What 4Growth Offers

Policymakers in agriculture and forestry increasingly recognise the transformative potential of digitalisation. From boosting competitiveness and productivity to improving food safety, reducing waste, and strengthening supply security across food, wood, and the broader bioeconomy, digital solutions can address multiple policy goals simultaneously. They also offer pathways to reduce fertiliser, herbicide, and pesticide use, mitigate environmental impacts, and enhance biodiversity.

Beyond these benefits, digital technologies can significantly reduce administrative burdens by automating reporting tasks. At the same time, they enable regulators to gain a more accurate, real-time understanding of land use and farming practices, improving preparedness for emerging risks such as plant diseases, pest outbreaks, and wildfires. This evidence base strengthens the design and implementation of effective policies.

Recognising these opportunities, the EU has placed digitalisation at the core of its strategic agenda. Initiatives such as the EU digital strategy for agriculture and the development of sectoral data spaces (e.g. the AgriDataSpace under the European Strategy for Data) aim to unlock the full potential of data-driven innovation in the sector.

From data to decisions: anticipating digital uptake

However, realising these benefits depends on widespread adoption. Digital tools, infrastructures, and services must be deployed at scale and taken up by farmers and forestry operators. For policymakers, this raises a critical question: how will digitalisation evolve, and where should policy support to or intervene?

The 4Growth project addresses these challenges by combining ground-truth data (collected through stakeholder surveys) with forward-looking market estimates of digital technology uptake up to 2040. These estimates cover:

• Overall adoption trends
• Specific technology categories
• Country-level differences
• Multiple market indicators

This provides a robust baseline for evidence-based policymaking.

Policymaking under uncertainty: why scenarios matter

Policymaking today does not happen under stable conditions. Geopolitical tensions, technological disruptions, and shifting societal priorities challenge even the most robust assumptions.

Can baseline projections alone support future-proof decisions?

To address this, the 4Growth team developed three foresight scenarios that allow policymakers to stress-test their strategies through “what if” questions:

• Reimagining Progress: What if Green Deal policies become globally dominant?
• The Fractured Continent: What if geopolitical tensions lead to inward-looking, self-sufficiency-driven policies?
• The Corporate Epoch: What if Big Tech and agribusiness merge to dominate the sector?

These scenarios provide alternative, plausible futures against which policy assumptions can be tested.

Turning foresight into actionable insight

The 4Growth Visualisation Platform integrates these scenarios directly into its analytical tools, allowing users to explore how different futures shape the uptake of digital solutions.

But what does this mean in practice?

Let’s consider a typical policymaking task:

Task: Increase the uptake of digital technologies through targeted funding

To design effective funding strategies and avoid windfall effects, policymakers need to understand:

• Which technologies are already widely adopted
• Which ones are growing rapidly
• Which ones are lagging behind

The platform provides exactly this overview:

• Recording and mapping technologies (e.g. remote sensing) already show high penetration and strong growth
• Variable rate technologies (key for precision farming) have moderate penetration and steady growth
• Robotics and smart machines currently have low penetration but the highest expected growth

In addition, policymakers can explore country-level differences. For example, the installed base of digital technologies is currently highest in countries such as France, Poland, and Hungary, all showing strong growth dynamics.

How scenarios change the picture

The real added value emerges when these insights are tested against different futures:

• In a Reimagining Progress scenario, strong sustainability policies and supportive data-sharing frameworks accelerate adoption. By 2040, the installed base could be around one-third higher than baseline projections.
• In The Corporate Epoch, large-scale consolidation leads to widespread, often mandatory, use of digital tools. Despite fewer farms, the scale of operations increases adoption, resulting in an installed base around 12.5% higher than the baseline.
• In The Fractured Continent, unequal access and limited public support initially slow adoption. Uptake remains below baseline until around 2035, before recovering through the spread of simpler, low-cost technologies.

A platform for informed, future-proof policymaking

This example only scratches the surface of what the 4Growth Visualisation Platform offers.

Users can:

• Analyse individual digital technologies in detail
• Compare adoption trends across European countries
• Explore multiple market indicators, including installed base, market potential, penetration rates, prices, revenues, and shipments
• Assess both baseline projections and alternative scenario outcomes for agriculture and forestry

By combining data, modelling, and foresight, the platform enables policymakers to better understand uncertainty, and to design more resilient, forward-looking policies.

Explore the platform here: https://visualisation.4growth-project.eu

The platform is currently in beta, and some data are still being refined. Nevertheless, it already provides rich insights and valuable functionality. We welcome your feedback via the platform’s feedback form.