1 000 initiatives and beyond: how FAO’s AgriTech Observatory helps navigate digital agriculture

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Europe and Central Asia held a webinar celebrating the growth of its AgriTech Observatory, a Digital Public Good designed to help navigate digital agricultural developments across the region. The event explored what has been accomplished so far and what is in store for the platform.

Moderated by Daniela Di Gianantonio, Head of the Digital Agriculture team at FAO for Europe and Central Asia, and Veronika Sherova, FAO Digital Agriculture specialist, the event, titled “Navigating Digital Agriculture in Europe and Central Asia: where we stand, where we’re going,” brought together more than 160 participants from policy, research, and development practice on 21 May 2026. 

The webinar marked a significant milestone: more than 1 000 digital agriculture initiatives have now been documented on the platform since its launch. The milestone provided an opportunity to bring interested parties together to discuss how best to use this knowledge.

A roadmap to navigate a fragmented landscape

Speaking at the opening, Preet Lidder, Technical Officer at the FAO Chief Scientist's Office, explained the Observatory’s importance in the context of the multiple crises agrifood systems are facing – conflicts, climate shocks, economic volatility and biodiversity loss.

Without concentrated efforts, researchers are hindered by scattered sources, policymakers may design programmes with limited evidence, and practitioners risk duplicating efforts. The Observatory was built precisely to address this, offering a structured, searchable repository of digital agriculture solutions, policies, projects, innovation infrastructure, and resources — all classified using internationally recognized frameworks from FAO, the United Nations (UN), and the European Union (EU). 

“Today, we mark a significant milestone: more than 1 000 digital agriculture initiatives catalogued across the region,” said Preet Lidder. “That number matters – but it is not the destination. It is the starting point for a more important question: how can we use this resource to generate insights and make better decisions? That is what today's event is about. We are not here to celebrate a number, but to make the shift from building the knowledge base to putting it to work. To demonstrate its practical value for research, programme design and policy, and open it up to the contributions and partnerships that will take it further”.

User experience: from policy, research, and practice

Three speakers shared how they had put the platform to practical use. Marialena Stagianni, Policy Officer of the Task Force on Sustainable Food Systems and Innovation at Re-Imagine Europa, described using the Observatory while preparing a policy paper on digital agriculture for the European Policy Center. Before discovering the platform, she had spent nearly two months manually searching for initiatives. “I found everything gathered in one place, and it saved an enormous amount of time,” she said, adding that filtering by implementation stage was particularly valuable for understanding which technologies had moved beyond the pilot phase.

Tomaso Ceccarelli, coordinator of the Digital Agri Hub at Wageningen Environmental Research — a complementary platform covering low- and middle-income countries — described how data sharing between the two platforms had produced insights neither could generate alone, including distinctive regional patterns in technology use. Cloud infrastructure, remote sensing, and IoT devices were among the most common technologies in Europe and Central Asia, while farm management was the dominant use case.

From Tajikistan, Kyu hee Do, Agriculture Technology consultant at the World Food Programme (WFP), explained how the Observatory helped her team produce an evidence-based long list of 22 locally available digital agriculture platforms for a project supporting smallholder farmers, ultimately narrowing these down to seven tools selected on criteria including language accessibility, offline functionality, and relevance to farmers’ priority needs.

The way forward

Daniela Di Gianantonio walked participants through FAO’s vision for the platform. Key planned additions include country profiles that combine Observatory data with the organization’s own technical assistance knowledge; a farmer digital readiness module drawing on surveys already conducted in Albania, Belarus, Kosovo¹, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and others; deeper analytical layers for each element of the platform's taxonomy; and AI-powered tools to help users find answers without having to navigate filters manually. 

The team recently launched a series of “AgriTech Observer” articles distilling insights from the platform’s data, with the first covering how farmers learn in the digital age.

Closing the event, FAO Deputy Regional Representative Raimund Jehle stressed that the Observatory is a shared knowledge infrastructure, not an FAO-owned product. “The value compounds when researchers bring their evidence to it, when technology providers register their initiatives, and when policymakers lean on it for evidence-based decision-making,” he said.

FAO is currently inviting users to submit initiatives to the platform, participate in UX feedback sessions, and explore partnership and funding opportunities to support the next phase of development.

¹References to Kosovo shall be understood to be in the context of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999).