Agro Intelligence Research Press Agro Intelligence Research Press

Search

Search results:
From Precision to Prudence: A Conceptual Framework for Responsible AI Decision-Making in Climate-Sensitive Farming
Agricultural artificial intelligence is increasingly shaped by a precision paradigm that treats good farming as the increasingly fine-grained optimization of inputs, outputs, risks, and operational decisions. This paradigm is attractive because it promises measurable efficiency, predictive control, and scalable decision support across complex farming systems. In climate-sensitive agriculture, however, the same orientation can narrow what counts as a good decision. The problem is that climate-sensitive farming is not merely a technical setting in which better data automatically produce better outcomes. Farmers must act under uncertainty, ecological variability, long time horizons, and ethically contested trade-offs involving productivity, resilience, livelihoods, and environmental stewardship. These conditions expose the limits of optimization as a sufficient guide for responsible agricultural AI. This article develops a conceptual framework that shifts the guiding principle of agricultural AI from precision to prudence. Prudence is understood as practical wisdom: the capacity to deliberate well about what is fitting, responsible, and contextually appropriate when action is necessary but certainty is unavailable. The framework therefore reorients AI from prescribing optimal decisions to supporting wise and accountable judgment. The article is based on a conceptual synthesis peer-reviewed publications across agricultural ethics, responsible innovation, precision agriculture, AI governance, climate adaptation, and science and technology studies. It critiques precision agriculture as an optimization paradigm, articulates prudence as a responsible AI principle, and develops a framework for climate-sensitive decision support. Two tables contrast the precision and prudence paradigms and present the proposed conceptual framework. The central argument is not that agricultural AI should abandon data, modelling, prediction, or decision support. Rather, responsible AI for climate-sensitive farming should use these capacities to enlarge human judgment rather than replace it. A prudent AI system helps farmers deliberate under uncertainty, compare trade-offs, question recommendations, and remain accountable for decisions that are ecological, social, and moral as well as technical.
Journal of Intelligent Agriculture and Food Systems
Original Research | Open access | 15 March 2024 | Article: 4

Responsible AI Governance in Agri-Food Supply Chains: A Framework for Transparency, Accountability, Traceability, and Human Oversight
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being embedded in agri-food supply chains through applications such as automated quality grading, risk scoring, demand forecasting, logistics optimisation, pricing analytics, and food safety alerts. These systems promise efficiency, resilience, and improved decision support, but they also reshape how decisions are made and who is affected by them. In food systems, AI governance is not only a technical issue but also a matter of safety, fairness, market access, and public trust. Existing responsible AI principles provide important normative foundations, including fairness, transparency, accountability, human oversight, and social benefit. However, these principles are often framed at a general level and do not fully address the distinctive structure of agri-food supply chains. Food chains are fragmented across farms, processors, logistics providers, retailers, technology platforms, regulators, and consumers, which makes governance more complex than in single-organisation AI deployment. This article develops a domain-specific Responsible AI Governance Framework for agri-food supply chains. The framework integrates four pillars: transparency, accountability, traceability, and human oversight. It argues that responsible AI in food must make algorithmic decisions visible, assign responsibility across distributed actors, preserve auditable records, and ensure meaningful human safeguards for high-risk decisions. The proposed framework specifies transparency requirements for different AI applications, maps accountability responsibilities across supply chain actors, connects traceability systems to auditability, and defines human oversight mechanisms for safety-critical and livelihood-sensitive decisions. Three tables operationalise the framework through transparency requirements, accountability allocation, and integrated governance mechanisms. The article concludes that responsible AI in food requires governance that is as distributed, interconnected, and safety-conscious as the supply chains it seeks to guide.
Journal of Intelligent Agriculture and Food Systems
Original Research | Open access | 15 March 2025 | Article: 18

Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance for Precision Agriculture: A Framework for Transparency, Accountability, Sustainability, and Farmer Trust
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.
Journal of Smart Farming, Precision Agriculture and Data Science
Original Research | Open access | 25 May 2025 | Article: 89

Responsible Foundation Models for Precision Agriculture: A Governance and Technical Safeguard Framework for Trustworthy Agricultural AI
Foundation models are becoming relevant to precision agriculture because they can connect sensing, remote sensing interpretation, multimodal data integration, knowledge retrieval, advisory communication, and farm decision-support workflows. Their broad capability, however, does not establish agronomic validity, trustworthy performance, operational safety, or deployment readiness. This article develops an original governance and technical safeguard framework for responsible agricultural foundation models. The framework treats these models as potential components of decision infrastructure and integrates trustworthy artificial intelligence requirements with data governance, validation, human oversight, farmer participation, monitoring, and explicit claim boundaries. It identifies requirements concerning data quality, provenance, documentation, transparency, explainability, interpretability, uncertainty communication, robustness, generalization, bias, fairness, privacy, cybersecurity, accountability, auditability, and traceability. It also maps risks arising from opaque pretraining data, uncertain data control, hallucination, factual error, agronomic invalidity, platform dependency, model drift, data drift, and unclear responsibility. Technical safeguards include data screening, domain-adaptation assessment, external and local validation, robustness testing, bias and fairness review, factual and agronomic checking, human-in-the-loop review, and continuing monitoring. Responsible deployment principles add purpose limitation, context sensitivity, incident response, withdrawal planning, and non-autonomy boundaries. The contribution is a structured conceptual framework that connects governance questions with technical evidence and accountable actors without claiming legal compliance, guaranteed trustworthiness, farmer approval, or deployment readiness.
Journal of Smart Farming, Precision Agriculture and Data Science
Original Research | Open access | 25 May 2026 | Article: 107

AI Liability in Precision Agriculture: An Accountability Framework Across Data, Model, Platform, Advisory, and Machinery Layers
Artificial intelligence is becoming embedded in precision agriculture through data-intensive monitoring, predictive models, digital platforms, advisory systems, robotics, and automated machinery. These arrangements complicate accountability because consequential outputs may result from interactions among data providers, model developers, platform operators, advisors, machinery manufacturers, system integrators, service providers, and farm operators rather than from a single actor or technical component. This article proposes a conceptual accountability framework for examining AI liability issues across agricultural AI systems without treating accountability mapping as a substitute for legal interpretation. The framework begins with agricultural use-case definition and stakeholder-role mapping, then examines data-level duties concerning quality, provenance, access, control, privacy, cybersecurity, and governance. It further maps model-level responsibilities for documentation, validation, robustness, bias assessment, explainability, uncertainty communication, and drift monitoring. Platform and advisory layers are addressed through governance, interface design, monitoring, escalation, human review, professional interpretation, and farmer-autonomy requirements. Machinery, automation, and operational risks are incorporated through control-system responsibilities, sensor-to-actuator traceability, supervisory control, fail-safe design, maintenance, incident reporting, and operational boundaries. The framework also identifies liability gaps created by fragmented evidence, unclear validation ownership, platform ambiguity, ineffective human oversight, and incomplete traceability. Its contribution is a structured method for clarifying responsibility pathways, evidence needs, decision boundaries, and governance gaps across interconnected agricultural AI layers. The framework is conceptual and does not determine legal liability, establish compliance, certify safety, allocate blame, or demonstrate deployment readiness.
Journal of Smart Farming, Precision Agriculture and Data Science
Original Research | Open access | 25 May 2026 | Article: 117