ASSESSMENT OF DIGITAL AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES AMONG COMMERCIAL ARABLE CROP FARMERS IN SOUTHWEST, NIGERIA

Smart agriculture has the potential for economic benefits through increased agricultural productivity, cost efficiency and market opportunities through increased communication; and environmental benefits as this will in turn, lead to greater food security, profitability and sustainability. This article presents the practices and challenges to smart agriculture among commercial arable crop farmers in Southwest, Nigeria considering the forms of digitalization in use, as well as the frequency of usage, period of usage, and challenges to the usage. We randomly sampled 45 commercial arable crop farmers across the southwest states in Nigeria. We made use of Structured questionnaire to extract needed information from the respondents. The data obtained were analysed with descriptive statistics. Our findings showed that the forms of digitalization used by agricultural firms include mobile phone (100%), cloud computing (56%), software (58%), remote sensing (40%), digital marketing (52%), and GIS (35%) while the average period of usage of digitalization was 10years. Our findings also revealed that the main challenges to the use of digitalization are high cost of procurement and installation (93%), low awareness of current state of digitalization in agriculture (84%), limited technical knowhow (78%), poor power supply (67%), and high cost of energy (62%). Although evidence at short-term revealed that smart agriculture has the potential of tackling key development issues such as food insecurity, poor output, poverty, and unemployment; the study showed that there is a need to enlighten agricultural firms of the benefits of smart agriculture, as well as plan and invest on sustainability of digitalization in agriculture to harness its full benefits/potentials.