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Artificial intelligence is increasingly positioned as a driver of agri-food transformation through sensing, prediction, optimisation, automation, and decision support. Across farms, supply chains, advisory systems, and governance settings, AI-enabled tools are changing how agricultural information is gathered, interpreted, and translated into action. These changes create important opportunities, but they also raise deeper theoretical questions about what kind of intelligence agri-food systems should develop. Much discussion of agri-food AI emphasises productivity, efficiency, technical accuracy, and optimisation. Yet sustainable agri-food transformation cannot be judged only by whether AI increases yields, lowers costs, or accelerates decisions. It must also be evaluated by whether intelligent systems strengthen resilience, support equity, and respect ecological limits. This article develops a theory of sustainable intelligence in agri-food systems. Sustainable intelligence is defined as the AI-enabled capacity of agri-food systems to sense, interpret, learn from, and respond to changing conditions while balancing productivity, resilience, equity, and ecological care. The theory treats these four dimensions not as separate goals, but as interdependent constructs that must be continuously aligned. The article builds theory by integrating scholarship on digital agriculture, food-system sustainability, resilience thinking, equity, ecological responsibility, and responsible AI. It focuses on the mechanisms through which sensing, prediction, optimisation, feedback, participation, and governance can either mediate or intensify tensions among agri-food system goals. In doing so, it shifts attention from AI as a technical instrument to AI as a socio-technical balancing capacity. The proposed theory explains sustainable intelligence as an emergent property of data integration, adaptive feedback, participatory governance, ecological sensitivity, and accountability. It argues that AI-enabled agri-food systems become sustainable not when they maximise a single performance metric, but when they help actors recognise trade-offs, negotiate priorities, and preserve the conditions for just and ecologically responsible production. Sustainable intelligence therefore offers a theoretical foundation for agri-food futures that are productive, resilient, equitable, and ecologically caring.

Agri-food systems increasingly operate under compound crises in which climate shocks, supply disruptions, market instability, ecological stress, and social vulnerability interact. These crises do not affect production, distribution, livelihoods, and food access in isolation. They move through connected risk pathways that can destabilise farms, supply chains, public institutions, and households at the same time. Artificial intelligence can support prediction, monitoring, early warning, and decision support in these contexts. However, technical forecasting alone does not constitute resilience when risks cascade across multiple domains. Agri-food resilience requires that predictive information be translated into adaptive decisions, coordinated response, and food security protection. This article develops a conceptual model of AI-supported agri-food resilience under compound crises. The model links climate shocks, supply disruptions, farmer adaptation, and food security governance as interacting domains. It treats AI as a decision-support function embedded within social, institutional, ecological, and market systems rather than as a stand-alone technological solution. The model identifies resilience mechanisms that connect risk detection, signal integration, uncertainty communication, adaptive decision support, institutional coordination, feedback learning, and accountability. It also clarifies boundary conditions that determine whether AI strengthens or weakens resilience. These include data quality, interpretability, local relevance, farmer participation, institutional response capacity, equity, and governance accountability. The article contributes a structured conceptual model for understanding how AI can support agri-food resilience when analytics are aligned with adaptation needs and food security objectives. It argues that resilient agri-food AI systems must connect prediction with human judgement, local knowledge, public action, and accountable coordination. The proposed model offers a basis for future empirical testing, policy design, and responsible innovation in crisis-sensitive food systems.

Climate-smart precision agriculture is increasingly discussed as a means of connecting farm data, environmental observation, and analytical modeling with climate adaptation, mitigation-relevant assessment, and resilience planning. However, data availability and predictive capability alone do not establish climate benefit, decision reliability, or farm readiness. This article proposes a conceptual data-science framework that organizes climate-smart use-case definition, farm-context mapping, multi-source data integration, adaptation analytics, mitigation-relevant analysis, climate-risk modeling, uncertainty assessment, resilience-oriented decision support, sustainability feedback, monitoring, and governance safeguards. The framework distinguishes climate hazards, exposure, vulnerability, adaptive capacity, forecasting, scenario analysis, and operational decision support while preserving boundaries between analytical indicators and verified outcomes. Remote sensing, sensors, weather and climate records, soil and crop observations, water and resource-use data, machine learning, geospatial analysis, time-series modeling, and data fusion are positioned as conditional inputs and methods rather than automatic sources of climate benefit. The framework also requires local validation, uncertainty communication, farmer participation, human oversight, data-quality assessment, provenance, interoperability, and feedback updating. Its main contribution is an integrated architecture for interpreting how data-science functions may support climate-smart precision agriculture without presenting modeled outputs as guaranteed adaptation, verified mitigation, proven resilience, carbon accounting, or deployment readiness. The article therefore frames climate-smart precision agriculture as a governed learning system whose value depends on evidence quality, contextual interpretation, transparent limitations, and iterative assessment.

Regenerative agriculture is increasingly associated with soil improvement, ecological restoration, climate adaptation, and more resilient farming systems, yet these outcomes cannot be inferred from a management label or from digital measurement alone. This article develops a conceptual framework for data-driven regenerative agriculture that links precision farming, soil health monitoring, biodiversity monitoring, ecological feedback, climate-risk interpretation, farmer participation, and responsible decision support. The framework approach treats regeneration as a context-dependent monitoring and interpretation problem involving heterogeneous data, multiple spatial and temporal scales, uncertain ecological relationships, and explicit claim boundaries. Precision farming contributes spatially and temporally resolved observations from sensors, remote sensing, soil sampling, crop monitoring, water data, and farm-management records, while soil-health interpretation requires function-linked indicators, longitudinal baselines, local validation, and separation of monitoring from verified restoration or carbon-accounting claims. Biodiversity monitoring is organized around agrobiodiversity, functional biodiversity, habitat conditions, landscape context, ecological indicators, and field-validated observation methods. Climate resilience is framed through hazards, exposure, vulnerability, adaptive capacity, farm-system adaptation, and uncertainty rather than as a guaranteed outcome. Regenerative decision support integrates these domains through data-quality review, provenance, interoperability, ecological interpretation, farmer knowledge, human oversight, sustainability feedback, and iterative framework updating. The principal contribution is a structured conceptual architecture for connecting digital agricultural capabilities with cautious ecological reasoning. The framework supports research design and monitoring-system development but does not independently verify regenerative outcomes, environmental performance, biodiversity recovery, soil restoration, carbon sequestration, climate resilience, operational safety, or deployment readiness.