Search

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 smart farming systems, yet explanation requirements are often treated as a single technical attribute rather than as stakeholder-dependent needs. This article develops a conceptual taxonomy of explainability requirements across agricultural decision contexts. The taxonomy approach distinguishes stakeholders by their roles, decision consequences, explanation purposes, required explanation objects, usability expectations, accountability needs, trust risks, and implementation boundaries. Farmers may require accessible, locally relevant, actionable, and uncertainty-aware explanations that preserve autonomy. Agronomists and advisors may require model logic, input relevance, data-quality information, output rationale, limitations, and evidence supporting professional validation. Regulatory stakeholders may require traceability, documentation, auditability, risk justification, and clear responsibility allocation. Platform providers, technology providers, data intermediaries, system operators, and data stewards may require lifecycle transparency, monitoring information, provenance records, version histories, and incident reconstruction. Supply-chain and sustainability actors may require interpretable provenance and decision boundaries without treating explanation as proof of quality, sustainability, or compliance. The taxonomy also identifies failures including under-explanation, over-explanation, misleading explanations, uncertainty omission, explanation overload, false confidence, provenance opacity, accountability gaps, and trust miscalibration. Its main contribution is a structured account of how explanation requirements change across stakeholders and decision settings. The taxonomy is conceptual and requires stakeholder validation, usability testing, governance assessment, and domain-specific evaluation before operational application.