# ICT in Rural Areas from the Perspective of Dairy Farming: A Systematic Review
## 3 Results
### Financial Development (15 Documents)  
The application of the new technologies within the business field is marking the beginning of a new era known as the \"Fourth Industrial Revolution\" or \"Industry 4.0\" [58]. This fact is arousing a huge interest in the companies since it promises to increase the productivity, flexibility, and automation of the internal processes, integrating value chains and supporting the companies in designing and offering new services based on the availability of data enabled by different technologies [59; 60; 61]. Enterprises are investing big efforts to understand how these technologies could be implemented to take advantage of their actual operations and offer a more competitive value proposition to the new and current clients [62]. As an appreciation of this tendency to the incorporation of the new technologies both at a social and at a business level, studies performed by [63] in 72 countries worldwide, affirm that the ICT are essential nowadays both for the individual and for companies, becoming a key tool for social inclusion and financial development, and contributing to the reduction of the poverty of any country. Another example of that can be seen in a study carried out by [64], where from the analysis of data collected from Eurostat of a survey about the use of the ICT at a household level in 2017, many of the benefits with which people are provided nowadays were reflected, such as the buying and selling of goods and services and the reduction of the time needed to complete any administrative procedure. This tendency also offers many advantages to micro-companies, particularly to those based in rural areas, despite the fact that digital divisions, both social and economic or even territorial, continue to create challenges for this sector of the rural economy [56]. In this field, more concretely in that of the production of milk, as is shown in research conducted by [12] in Baakse Beek (east of the Netherlands), the digital economy, within the frame of Industry 4.0, has an enormous application, since it has had great success in the increase of the productivity of the farms, achieving a sustainable economic expansion. Thus, other studies such as those performed by [13], in which drawing from surveys from the Irish Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) in Ireland, it is shown how the economic profits of the farms depend on their own level of innovation. Therefore, innovative farmers can obtain higher economic profits, recovering the whole investment made in innovation. However, as demonstrated by [65] in their research on dairy farms in the United Kingdom, the ICT also imply meaningful changes in the knowledge and skills required from the farmers, as in the case of Automatic Milking Systems (AMS), which imply that farmers need to learn how to control and use as much electronic data as possible. In this context, it is essential to remember that until recently, these users had a limited control over their exposition to the risk factors--the price of the milk or the seasonal conditions [66], which have been progressively reduced by the application of the ICT. Another key factor in terms of livestock development is the change of paradigm in terms of the support to farmers through the PAC (Common Agricultural Politicy), which is being constantly reduced and makes it necessary for farmers to have a high degree of knowledge about the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) of their farms in order to achieve the objectives of the market. As demonstrated by [67] in their studies performed in Central and East Europe (Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia), clear differences both at a strategic level and at an agricultural objectives level among the analyzed countries can be observed. As a result, the farmers' attitudes towards the market and the future Common Agricultural Policy are even more negative than those of a group of farmers from West Europe.