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Smart agriculture increasingly combines artificial intelligence, sensor networks, automation, remote sensing, robotics, and decision-support systems to guide agricultural production and resource management. These technologies promise more precise monitoring, faster diagnosis, improved input targeting, and better coordination of farm operations. Their sustainability value, however, depends on how optimisation goals are defined and how decisions interact with ecological, technical, and social systems. A central problem is that algorithmic systems are often evaluated through yield gains, input efficiency, prediction accuracy, or operational performance. These metrics are important, but they do not necessarily reveal whether an improvement in one sustainability domain shifts pressure onto another. A farm system may become more productive while increasing water demand, energy dependence, biodiversity risk, or unequal exposure to technological burdens. This article develops a conceptual model of algorithmic sustainability trade-offs in smart agriculture. The model explains how yield, water, energy, biodiversity, and equity operate as connected outcome domains rather than isolated evaluation categories. It treats trade-offs as system-level tensions that emerge through optimisation objectives, data availability, decision rules, platform design, governance arrangements, and implementation contexts. The article contributes a systems-oriented framework for analysing when smart agriculture supports sustainability and when it redistributes environmental or social costs. It argues that algorithmic optimisation should not be treated as automatically sustainable simply because it improves efficiency or prediction. Instead, smart agriculture should be assessed by how its decisions balance productivity, resource use, ecological resilience, and distributional fairness.