From the phone booth to the smartphone in one season: why Italy’s next revolution will come from the fields

In brief

• Italian agriculture is among the country’s most strategic yet least digitised sectors.
• Three emergencies overlap: generational renewal, labour exploitation and soil degradation.
• Data, sensors, robotics and precision irrigation can improve productivity, transparency and resource use.
• The real shift will not be a gradual upgrade: for many farms it could be a direct leap toward data-driven agriculture.

Why it matters

Agriculture means food, territory, exports, water and work. Digitising the fields is therefore not a narrow technology story: it can affect business competitiveness, young people’s access to farming, the reduction of the hardest jobs most vulnerable to exploitation, and the ability of soils to withstand drought and climate change. Understanding this transformation now means understanding a decisive part of Italy’s economy and national resilience.

There is an image that explains the idea better than any report. Thirty years ago, if you wanted to make a phone call, you looked for a phone booth: token, queue, hurry. If someone had told you that a few years later you would carry in your pocket a computer more powerful than those used to go to the Moon, you would have called them a visionary. Then it happened. Not over a generation, but in a few years. And those still standing by the phone booth did not go through a gradual update: they jumped straight to the smartphone, from almost nothing to everything.

Italian agriculture today is that phone booth. Its technological transformation will not look like ordinary modernisation, but like a change of system — closer to a Copernican revolution than to a series of incremental upgrades.

This column was created to document that leap while it happens. Not thirty years from now: now.

The paradox of the oldest sector

Agriculture is the oldest productive sector in civilisation and, in Italy, one of the most strategic: food, territory, identity and Made in Italy exports. Yet the numbers describe a sector weighed down by three emergencies that reinforce one another.

First emergency: there are not enough young farmers

Farms run by people under 40 account for only 9.3% of the national total. The average age of farm managers is above 60, while youth-owned businesses registered with Chambers of Commerce fell by 8.5% between 2018 and 2023.

And yet, when a young person takes over a farm, the results can be striking: average farm size is almost twice as large, 18.3 hectares versus 9.8; output per hectare is €4,296 compared with a European average of €2,207; and labour productivity rose by 61% in cases supported by settlement programmes. The problem is not that young farmers fail. It is that many struggle to enter the sector at all.

For 57% of under-40s, access to credit is identified as the main obstacle, compared with 33% in the European benchmark cited by the source material. Technology can change this equation. A data-driven farm can produce forecasts, yield histories and verifiable field data. In other words, it can generate bankable trust. A sensor in the soil can, paradoxically, help unlock the loan that a family name no longer guarantees.

Second emergency: the labour that remains invisible

Illegal labour intermediation and exploitation are national problems and take different forms from northern to southern Italy. Alongside traditional models, more opaque arrangements have been documented, including so-called “landless cooperatives” and forms of “digital labour exploitation” in which platforms and algorithms may be used to compress protections and rights.

Law 199/2016 strengthened criminal enforcement, but repression alone is not enough. Exploitation thrives where work is harsh, seasonal and invisible. Technology matters here too. Mechanisation in industrial tomato harvesting — close to complete coverage in the North and already very high in the Centre-South — shows how automation and industrial organisation can reduce dependence on the hardest manual tasks, the same jobs that are often most exposed to abuse.

Field robotics, treatment drones and supply-chain traceability systems can make it easier to verify who worked, when, and under what conditions. They do not automatically eliminate exploitation, but they can reduce the economic space and opacity in which it survives.

Third emergency: the soil is degrading

According to the figures cited for this analysis, 17.4% of Italian territory is already in a state of degradation, while parts of Sardinia face particularly high desertification risk. In a single year, Italy loses roughly 77 square kilometres of natural land, equivalent to about 2.4 square metres per second.

Organic carbon in agricultural soils is reported at around 1% on average, a level associated with soils that are poor in organic matter and less able to retain water and nutrients. Raising organic matter by one percentage point can mean retaining roughly 300 additional cubic metres of water per hectare. Multiplied across national agricultural land, the potential is enormous. Healthy soil is one of the largest water infrastructures we could build without constructing a dam.

Rebuilding it requires data: root-zone moisture sensors, satellite mapping, precision irrigation and predictive models that indicate where and when to intervene. In Mediterranean vineyards, precision irrigation systems have already shown water savings in the range of 30-40% in some cases without sacrificing quality.

The Copernican revolution

Put the pieces together. A sector in which only 42% of companies have adopted at least one 4.0 solution, and where artificial intelligence is still used by a small share of firms — cited at around 8% — has an enormous amount of transformation ahead. Italy’s digital-agriculture market was worth about €2.5 billion in 2023 and had been growing at double-digit rates before slowing as incentives declined.

But the central question is not about trade-fair gadgets. It is about food, climate, water and dignity at work.

In Italy this revolution is still too often described in reductive terms. We call it “precision agriculture”, as if it were an optional extra for wealthy farms. In reality it is the point at which an entire sector changes its frame of reference: from farming that decides by habit — “we have always irrigated this way” — to farming that decides through data; from field work that consumes people to work that increasingly requires skills; from soil treated like a mine to soil managed as living infrastructure.

Copernicus did not improve the Ptolemaic model: he overturned it. The Earth stopped being the centre of the system. Italian agriculture may, symbolically, make the opposite move: the land will return to the centre — but this time measured, connected and regenerated.

When that happens, the transition may be as fast as the move from the phone booth to the smartphone. Those who understand first how to use data, robotics, artificial intelligence, sensors and predictive models will hold an advantage that could last for decades. Those who remain still risk ending up like the telephone token.

This column will be the logbook of that transition: technologies, startups, real cases, public investment, resistance and data. Because the Copernican revolution in the fields is one of Italy’s most important — and least told — technology stories.

The harvest starts here.

Sources and data cited

• ISTAT, 7th General Census of Agriculture, for farm structure and generational renewal.
• National Youth Council, National Youth Plan 2025, for youth enterprises and access to credit.
• Divulga research centre and data cited by Il Sole 24 Ore, for output by youth-led farms and support measures.
• Emilia-Romagna Region, Rural Development, for productivity and value added in farms managed by newly established young farmers.
• Law 199/2016 and sector sources on illegal labour intermediation and mechanisation in industrial tomato harvesting.
• ISPRA, CREA and Pro Natura, for soil degradation, land consumption, organic carbon and water retention.
• Smart AgriFood Observatory of Politecnico di Milano and sector sources, for the value and adoption of Agriculture 4.0.