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Reliable estimation of crop yield is vital for refining farming operations and guaranteeing food supply. This investigation tested the capacity of machine learning techniques to estimate tomato yield using meteorological measurements, spectral reflectance bands, and vegetation indices subjected to different nitrogen levels and bio-stimulant applications to generate variation in crop development. UAV-mounted sensors captured spectral information across seven acquisition dates spanning October 27 to December 15, 2023, matching critical developmental windows: vegetative establishment (acquisition 1), anthesis (acquisitions 2 and 3), fruit set and enlargement (acquisitions 4, 5, and 6), and initial maturation (acquisition 7). Discriminating explanatory variables were selected via the Pearson correlation metric (r > 0.65, P < 0.05), incorporating Near Infrared (NIR), Red Edge, and Red wavebands, together with vegetation indices comprising NDVI, GNDVI, NDRE, and SAVI. Remotely sensed canopy signatures gathered throughout the fruit set and enlargement window (acquisitions 5 and 6) displayed the tightest association with harvested yield (r = 0.66–0.74), reinforcing the necessity of spectral intelligence from the middle to latter parts of the cycle. When comparing predictive algorithms, both linear regression (LR) and XGBoost yielded the strongest predictive skill, producing root mean squared error (RMSE) figures of 16.13 kg and 16.15 kg, respectively, matched with R² values reaching 0.63. Support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) implementations also delivered competent outcomes, achieving RMSE scores of 17.15 kg and 17.18 kg, respectively. By comparison, the deep learning architecture lagged notably (RMSE = 23.49 kg, R² = 0.23), plausibly attributable to data scarcity. This research spotlights the prognostic capability inherent in spectral wavebands and underscores the centrality of growth-stage-aligned spectral acquisition for yield forecasting.

Digital agriculture technologies are increasingly positioned as tools for strengthening food security through improved sensing, prediction, automation, decision support, and resource management. These technologies are promoted as ways to help agricultural systems respond to climate stress, resource constraints, production volatility, and disruptions across agri-food value chains. Their potential relevance extends from farm-level monitoring to broader food-system coordination. Evidence on digital agriculture is distributed across multiple technology domains, including artificial intelligence, Internet of Things systems, robotics, remote sensing, and decision-support platforms. Food-security implications are often reported indirectly through productivity, efficiency, sustainability, resilience, risk reduction, or decision-quality outcomes. This dispersion makes it difficult to judge where the evidence is strongest and where food-security claims remain underdeveloped. This umbrella review synthesises review-level evidence on digital agriculture technologies in relation to food-security pathways. It examines how the reviewed literature connects digital agriculture with food availability, access, utilisation, stability, resilience, sustainability, productivity, and agri-food decision-making. The article focuses on review evidence rather than primary empirical findings. The approach compares review-level evidence across technology domains, outcome pathways, implementation conditions, and evidence gaps. It gives particular attention to whether digital agriculture evidence demonstrates direct food-security relevance or supports more indirect pathways through resource efficiency, monitoring capacity, operational timeliness, or improved decision support. It also distinguishes technical potential from demonstrated system-level benefit. The contribution of this umbrella review is to clarify where digital agriculture evidence is most developed, where food-security links remain indirect, and what future research is needed to evaluate digital agriculture as a contributor to resilient and inclusive food systems. The synthesis shows that digital agriculture should be assessed not only by technical performance but also by its capacity to support equitable, sustainable, and context-sensitive food-security outcomes.

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.

Food security early warning systems increasingly draw on artificial intelligence, remote sensing, predictive analytics, climate information, crop monitoring, market indicators, and vulnerability data to identify emerging risks before they become severe crises. These systems are expected to provide timely signals about threats to food availability, access, utilisation, and stability across diverse ecological, economic, and social settings. Yet many early warning approaches remain fragmented. Climate risk, market instability, crop stress, and human vulnerability are often analysed in separate technical workflows, which can weaken interpretation, delay action, or produce alerts that are insufficiently linked to response capacity. This article develops a conceptual architecture for AI-enabled food security early warning systems. The architecture treats early warning as a layered process that connects data ingestion, risk-domain analytics, signal integration, uncertainty interpretation, alert generation, decision support, response targeting, and feedback governance. The proposed architecture explains how multi-source data and predictive models can be translated into interpretable and actionable food security warnings. It also emphasises that AI-enabled early warning can fail when data are incomplete, model outputs are opaque, vulnerable populations are underrepresented, or alerts are disconnected from institutions capable of acting.

Intelligent agriculture increasingly uses artificial intelligence, sensors, remote sensing, automation, modelling, and decision-support systems to monitor and manage agricultural production. These tools can strengthen observation, prediction, and coordination across farms and landscapes. Yet their contribution to agricultural transformation depends on the ecological aims toward which they are designed and governed. Regenerative agriculture requires more than improved efficiency or narrower optimisation of inputs. It calls for soil restoration, biodiversity protection, ecological feedback, and long-term system health. Intelligent systems therefore need to be evaluated not only by productivity gains, but also by their capacity to support ecological recovery. This article develops a conceptual framework for regenerative intelligence in agriculture. Regenerative intelligence is defined as the AI-supported capacity of agricultural systems to monitor, interpret, and support soil restoration, biodiversity protection, and long-term system health through adaptive and ecologically accountable decision pathways. The framework explains how sensing, ecological analytics, modelling, decision support, monitoring, feedback, and governance can contribute to regenerative agricultural transformation. It also clarifies that AI-supported agriculture is not automatically regenerative. Its regenerative value depends on ecological indicators, farmer participation, responsible governance, biodiversity sensitivity, soil-health interpretation, and sustained learning from ecological outcomes.

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.

Generative artificial intelligence is emerging as a potentially important component of precision agriculture through its capacity to create synthetic data, generate agricultural imagery, retrieve and reformulate knowledge, support conversational advisory interfaces, and assist decision-support workflows. However, evidence of technical feasibility is developing faster than evidence of agronomic validity, reliability, farmer-centred usefulness, and responsible deployment. This critical review evaluates generative AI as a distinct agricultural technology class, with particular attention to generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, variational autoencoders, large language models, vision-language models, foundation models, fine-tuning, prompting, domain adaptation, and retrieval-augmented generation. It critically examines the proposed use of synthetic crop, disease, weed, pest, and remote-sensing data for augmentation, class-imbalance mitigation, and label-scarcity support, while emphasizing image realism, biological plausibility, source-data quality, and synthetic-real domain gaps. The review also assesses generative decision support and advisory systems, distinguishing accessible language generation and knowledge retrieval from agronomically validated recommendations. Reliability concerns include hallucination, factual inaccuracy, uncertainty underreporting, poor local adaptation, robustness limitations, benchmark insufficiency, and failures of human oversight. Responsible deployment further requires data governance, privacy protection, accountability, transparency, explainability, farmer trust, digital inclusion, risk monitoring, and assessment of computational and sustainability costs. The review contributes an integrated opportunity-risk interpretation and identifies priorities for domain-specific benchmarks, synthetic-data validation, hallucination measurement, uncertainty-aware assistance, human-in-the-loop evaluation, farmer-centred design, governance documentation, and cautious field-readiness assessment.