Digital agriculture today is not only about crops and soil, it is about data streams, satellite imagery, predictive models, and real-time decisions.
A real-world exercise to understand the digital divide in agriculture
The recent workshop organized by Consorzio LEB, one of the Phito partners in Northern Italy, brought together high-school students focusing on agricultural studies. It showed them how they can move beyond class textbooks and step into real decision-making roles during an extreme rainfall event in the midst of irrigation season.
Rather than working on a theoretical case, students were challenged to interpret real datasets and understand how complex systems, where irrigated agriculture and urban areas co-exist, respond under pressure.
Learning to interpret agricultural data for real decisions
Students acted as farmers, science advisors, operational managers, city mayors, and Consorzio’s communication team, and had the important role of translating satellite data, weather forecasts, and artificial-intelligence outputs into practical actions to balance irrigation demand and flood risk across the landscape.
Why the digital divide in agriculture is not only about technology
This exercise showed that digital transformation in agriculture is not only about technology availability, but also about the ability of people to understand, interpret, and act on data together.
It highlighted the importance of accessible knowledge, shared decision-making, and most of all, community-based coordination to build resilience and translate tools into valuable actions. Because strong communities are at the heart of lasting change.
How the Phito App helps reduce the digital divide in agriculture
The PHITO app builds on this same principle: beyond information access, it creates a community-based environment where farmers can connect with the digital world, but also peers, advisors, and solution providers, to share experiences, and actively drive change within their landscapes.
By integrating open-source geo-data into a user-friendly decision-support environment, PHITO aims to make digital tools not only available, but truly usable—especially for small and medium-sized agricultural stakeholders.
