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Autonomous farming systems are moving rapidly from experimental prototypes into commercial and operational agricultural settings. Autonomous tractors, robotic weeders, drones, harvest-assist systems, and sensor-guided machines promise to address labour shortages, improve operational efficiency, and support more precise field management. Yet the governance arrangements needed to ensure that these systems remain safe, understandable, and accountable have not developed at the same pace. The central problem is not only whether autonomous machines can perform agricultural tasks accurately. It is whether farmers, workers, contractors, and rural communities can understand, supervise, question, override, and hold these systems accountable when they act in complex farm environments. Without deliberate attention to trust calibration, human override, explainability, and accountability, autonomous farming may produce technically impressive but socially fragile systems. This article develops a Human-Centred Governance Framework for autonomous farming. The framework is designed around four pillars: calibrated trust, meaningful human override, explainable decision-making, and clear accountability structures. Its purpose is to shift governance attention from machine capability alone toward the conditions under which autonomous systems can be responsibly integrated into agricultural work. The proposed framework shows that human-centred governance is not an optional ethical supplement to autonomous farming. It is a practical requirement for safe deployment, legitimate adoption, and accountable operation. By integrating trust, override, explainability, and accountability, the framework provides guidance for farm managers, technology developers, regulators, and agricultural service providers.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in precision agriculture through sensing, remote observation, predictive modelling, automated classification, and decision-support applications. Technical performance alone, however, is insufficient for determining whether these systems are responsibly designed or appropriately used. This article proposes an original governance framework that connects agricultural context definition, farm-data governance, transparency, explainability, accountability, sustainability assessment, farmer participation, human oversight, risk safeguards, implementation-readiness review, monitoring, and adaptive feedback. The framework treats transparency as a requirement for documenting data provenance, data quality, model assumptions, system limitations, and decision pathways, while explainability is positioned as a task-specific means of supporting interpretation rather than proof of model validity. Accountability is structured through explicit allocation of responsibilities among developers, platform providers, data stewards, advisors, farmers, and oversight actors. Environmental, social, and economic sustainability are assessed alongside digital inclusion, usability, local relevance, farmer autonomy, and trust-building conditions. The framework also addresses algorithmic opacity, bias, model drift, poor local calibration, data misuse, cybersecurity, automation dependence, accountability gaps, and implementation overclaiming. Its principal contribution is a layered, adaptive governance model for responsible agricultural decision support. The framework supports governance planning and research design but does not establish empirical validity, legal compliance, policy acceptance, farmer approval, sustainability performance, trust, certification, or deployment readiness.

Decision-support systems are increasingly positioned as mechanisms for translating agricultural data and analytical models into farm-management recommendations, yet their methodological quality cannot be judged through predictive performance alone. This article proposes an original methodological framework for designing and evaluating decision-support systems in precision agriculture. The framework integrates farm-management decision-context definition, stakeholder mapping, data-quality and provenance assessment, model and recommendation-logic documentation, explainability and interpretability requirements, usability and farmer-centered design, validation planning, decision-reliability assessment, adoption-barrier analysis, implementation-condition assessment, human oversight, and iterative feedback. Explainability is treated as a role-sensitive design requirement involving input visibility, output explanation, decision rationale, uncertainty communication, traceability, and appropriate explanation timing and format. Usability is addressed through farmer participation, co-design, workflow integration, accessibility, local relevance, manageable decision-support workload, training, and feedback mechanisms. Validation is extended beyond internal model testing to include external and local validation, calibration, error analysis, field-validation planning, drift monitoring, and review of the complete recommendation pathway. Adoption is interpreted as a contextual and voluntary process shaped by perceived usefulness, trust, affordability, infrastructure, digital capability, interoperability, support, and governance. Human oversight remains necessary because neither technical performance nor explanation quality independently establishes decision reliability. The framework contributes a structured method for coordinating design and evaluation activities while retaining explicit boundaries against claims of guaranteed decision quality, adoption, or deployment readiness.