Digital Solutions Are Reaching Small Farms
By 2050, the world’s population is expected to reach approximately 9.66 billion, and all those people will need to eat. How can we feed a growing global population? Participants explored this question at the practical workshop “Agritech on Thin Data: Satellite, Drone and the Farmer’s Phone,” held as part of the business program of the 2nd Global Digital Forum in Moscow.
Food security is becoming an increasingly pressing issue worldwide. Demand is growing much faster than the amount of land available for farming, making it essential to adopt technologies, including digital tools, that can significantly increase agricultural output. That was the focus of the forum discussion.
The discussion was moderated by Oleg Knyazkov, Deputy Head of the Industry Expertise Center at Rosselkhozbank. He opened the conversation about modernizing agriculture with the observation: “Anything that improves efficiency adds value.” For now, however, this principle applies primarily to large farms, where digital technologies are already well established. For smaller farms, the picture is much more complicated. Digital technologies have reached only 15% of farms in Russia so far, and the situation is similar in many other countries.
Participants from India, where small farms play a significant role, shared successful digital solutions to this challenge.
“Landholdings are highly fragmented. Our task is to connect them. Smart sensors are embedded in virtually every square meter of land, and they can be managed from a smartphone. Satellite telemetry and drones also provide a detailed picture. India is building a digital model of agriculture,” said Ashutosh Vijay Singh, Founder and CEO of the Association For Developmental Actions and Co-Founder of Farminiti Agro Products.
To accelerate the adoption of modern technologies, India is seeking to deepen AgTech cooperation with Russia and countries of the Global South.
Esther Atera, an agricultural engineer at Agrotera Farm in Kenya, highlighted successful digital projects in her country. One example is Plantix, an app that lets farmers photograph a crop with a smartphone to identify a disease and learn how to address it. The Hello Tractor service is also popular. It calculates the area of a field and recommends different approaches to cultivating it.
In Nigeria, however, smart devices for agriculture are still rare. Lydia Mang, Chief Operating Officer of AgroMate Nigeria, explained that small farms produce 80–90% of the country’s food, yet farmers still use the same tools they relied on 10 or 20 years ago, often without accounting for factors such as climate change. Adopting new technologies could significantly improve the efficiency of processes such as crop processing, sorting and transportation, she said.
Konstantin Shadrin, Director General of Inno-Agro, a developer of the Agrika digital platform for farmers, explained how digital technologies can increase yields and lower production costs.
“We start by examining the soil’s agrochemical composition at a given location, determining which crops are suitable for cultivation there and identifying what grew there previously, going back as far as five years. This is important for understanding which diseases may have accumulated and which crops are not recommended. We must take good care of our primary production resource: the land,” he said. Any agricultural producer can order a field-scouting service from Inno-Agro. A drone equipped with a multispectral camera surveys the field, and an agronomist receives an analytical report that serves as a kind of “diagnosis” of the field, along with recommendations for improving yields. Over the past year, the company has increased the daily productivity of its field scouts from 300 to 1,000 hectares.
Agricultural digitalization in Russia is advancing rapidly. In 2026, unmanned aerial systems are expected to be used on more than 1.25 million hectares of farmland in the country. By 2030, the additional impact of adopting digital technologies is projected to amount to around 4 million metric tons of grain, pulses and oilseed crops. New solutions are gradually becoming more accessible not only to large agricultural holdings but also to small farms. Russia and countries of the Global South are ready to share their experience.
