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Smart farming is increasingly promoted as a pathway for improving agricultural productivity, resource efficiency, climate responsiveness, and data-driven decision-making. Its core technologies include sensors, digital platforms, machine learning, remote sensing, robotics, automation, and decision-support systems. These tools are often presented as mechanisms for making agriculture more precise, predictable, and adaptive. However, smart farming is not only a technical shift in agricultural tools. It also changes how knowledge is produced, how decisions are justified, how risks are distributed, and how farmers interact with platforms, advisers, suppliers, regulators, and markets. A critical review perspective is therefore needed to examine the social, institutional, political, and ecological consequences of agricultural digitalization. This article critically reviews smart farming as a socio-technical transformation rather than a purely technical modernization process. It examines how datafication, digital governance, farmer adoption, platform dependency, power asymmetry, and sustainability tensions shape the meaning and consequences of smart farming. The central argument is that smart farming should be evaluated through its effects on data control, farmer agency, institutional accountability, and ecological responsibility. The review synthesizes scholarship on digital agriculture, precision agriculture, smart farming, data governance, adoption barriers, farmer-centered challenges, sustainability claims, and responsible innovation. It does not treat technology adoption as a simple matter of farmer willingness or technical readiness. Instead, it situates adoption within broader arrangements of infrastructure, affordability, trust, knowledge, governance, and market pressure. The article contributes a critical synthesis of smart farming evidence and develops a forward-looking agenda for research and governance. It argues that smart farming futures should be designed around transparency, participation, interoperability, accountable digital systems, social equity, and ecological care. The review therefore reframes smart farming as a contested transformation whose benefits depend on how digital systems are governed, adopted, and made accountable.