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Smart farming has entered a phase in which agricultural fields, machines, livestock systems, greenhouses, and advisory platforms increasingly generate continuous streams of digital information. Sensors promise greater precision, faster monitoring, and more responsive management, yet their proliferation has not automatically improved farmer decision-making. Many farms now face a paradox in which more data are available than can be interpreted, trusted, or acted upon in routine agronomic practice. The central problem addressed in this article is the widening gap between sensor abundance and actionable agronomy. Smart farming systems often excel at data collection but remain less effective at filtering, prioritising, and translating data into decisions that farmers can use under time, labour, weather, and resource constraints. This creates a data-to-decision gap that reduces the practical value of agricultural digitalisation. The objective of the article is to propose a conceptual pathway for reducing data overload in smart farming systems. The pathway moves from sensor data acquisition to information filtering, decision relevance, decision translation, and actionable agronomic delivery. It is designed to help researchers, developers, advisors, and farm managers evaluate not only whether data are collected, but whether they are converted into usable decisions. The proposed pathway identifies four sequential stages: sensor data acquisition, information filtering and relevance assessment, decision translation, and actionable agronomy delivery. Three tables support the framework by cataloguing sensor sources, classifying filtering strategies, and presenting the full pathway. The article concludes that the value of smart farming should be judged less by the amount of data generated and more by the quality, usability, and timeliness of the agronomic decisions enabled.

Agricultural artificial intelligence increasingly combines sensor measurements, remote sensing, farm records, predictive modelling, and digital decision support. Yet agricultural context cannot be adequately represented through machine-readable data or model performance alone. Farming decisions are also shaped by tacit knowledge, farmer expertise, local ecological understanding, seasonal experience, farm history, cultural relationships, and institutional power. This article proposes a conceptual framework for integrating these dimensions into context-aware agricultural AI without treating local or Indigenous knowledge as extractable technical inputs. The framework begins with context-aware use-case definition and farm, agroecological, cultural, and historical context mapping. It then distinguishes tacit, experiential, situated, local, Indigenous, traditional ecological, scientific, and model-based knowledge while preserving differences in authority, representation, and validation. Participatory design, farmer-centered design, knowledge co-production, human oversight, local validation, knowledge sovereignty, Indigenous data sovereignty, access control, and ethical review are positioned as interconnected requirements rather than optional additions. The framework also addresses knowledge extraction, misappropriation, decontextualization, translation loss, contextual bias, algorithmic opacity, consent ambiguity, unequal benefit distribution, and trust overclaiming. Its principal contribution is a staged architecture that links knowledge plurality with contextual interpretation, governance safeguards, uncertainty communication, feedback, and explicit decision boundaries. The framework is intended to guide conceptual development and research design. It does not authorize knowledge use, establish community or Indigenous approval, validate Indigenous knowledge through AI, guarantee cultural appropriateness or trust, or demonstrate operational or deployment readiness.