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Machine learning is increasingly applied across agri-food systems to support prediction, classification, optimisation, monitoring, and decision-making. These applications now extend from farm-level production to processing, logistics, consumption, and food-waste management. As data-intensive agriculture expands, machine learning is often presented as an enabling technology for sustainable agri-food transitions. Despite this promise, the sustainability evidence base remains fragmented. Many studies report improvements in model accuracy, prediction performance, or operational decision support, but they do not always specify how these technical gains translate into environmental, economic, or social outcomes. This creates uncertainty about whether machine learning contributes to sustainability transitions directly, indirectly, or only under particular implementation conditions. This systematic review examines how machine learning contributes to sustainable agri-food transitions through environmental, economic, and social impact pathways. It focuses on the relationship between machine learning methods, agri-food applications, and sustainability-relevant outcomes rather than treating model performance as an end in itself. The review asks where evidence is strongest, where it remains indirect, and how different pathways vary across production, processing, distribution, consumption, waste reduction, and governance. The review finds that environmental and economic pathways are more developed than social and equity pathways. Evidence is strongest where machine learning supports precision input management, yield forecasting, irrigation decision support, operational efficiency, supply-chain analytics, and food-waste reduction. However, stronger longitudinal evaluation, causal assessment, life-cycle integration, participatory design, and equity-sensitive governance are needed before machine learning can be judged as a reliable driver of sustainable agri-food transitions.

Foundation models and multimodal artificial intelligence are beginning to reshape agricultural AI by enabling systems that can integrate images, text, sensor streams, remote-sensing data, environmental records, and management information. These approaches differ from earlier narrow models because they can reuse learned representations across related tasks and support richer forms of agricultural interpretation. Their potential relevance spans crop monitoring, disease detection, advisory services, automation, forecasting, and agri-food decision support. Despite this promise, the transfer of large-scale AI systems into agriculture remains complex. Agricultural environments are biologically variable, spatially heterogeneous, seasonally dynamic, and shaped by management decisions that are often poorly captured in available datasets. As a result, questions remain about data quality, annotation adequacy, domain adaptation, validation, explainability, governance, and deployment risk. This scoping review maps emerging applications, data requirements, and deployment risks associated with foundation models and multimodal AI in agriculture and agri-food systems. It focuses on how the reviewed literature frames model architectures, data modalities, application domains, validation needs, and governance concerns. The purpose is not to estimate pooled effectiveness but to chart the evidence landscape and clarify where knowledge is advancing or remains unsettled. The review uses a scoping approach to organise literature around key concepts, model types, data inputs, agricultural tasks, implementation settings, and responsible deployment concerns. It charts relationships among remote-sensing foundation models, vision-language systems, large language models, generative AI, multimodal data fusion, benchmark datasets, and agricultural decision-support systems. It also identifies gaps in field validation, interoperability, low-resource contexts, participatory governance, and trustworthy deployment. The review contributes a structured synthesis of how foundation models and multimodal AI may extend agricultural sensing, prediction, automation, and decision support. It highlights that technical capability alone is insufficient for responsible agricultural use. Robust data infrastructures, context-aware adaptation, transparent validation, and accountable governance will be central to whether these systems support sustainable and equitable agri-food transformation.