# Revolution 4.0: Industry vs. Agriculture in a Future Development for SMEs
## 3 Concept of Agriculture 4.0
### Virtualization of an Agro-Food Supply Chain  
The virtual term is opposed to the real and physical terms. Virtualization allows to cancel some important limits of physical reality: (i) place, since virtual representation does not require on-site presence to observe, process, control and act accordingly; and (ii) time, since the representation of real objects in a virtual world allows not only the historicization of data but, above all, to simulate possible evolutions in the future and to imagine answers to extreme external stimuli to carry out sensitivity tests (e.g., to verify the effects of sudden, even if temporary, machine downtime, lack of raw materials caused by adverse local climatic events, etc. [59]) (Figure 4). Applying the same concepts to different realities, virtual reality permits to create virtual environments with a virtual team (as a virtual work place where the actors of the production process collaborate) and a virtual reality. It aims to create a virtual environment that must be perceived by human beings as real through interfaces that allow to simulate visual, auditory, and tactile experiences. In this sense, virtual organization emerges as dynamic organizational structures that temporarily bring together resources from different organizations to better respond to business opportunities. While virtual objects define physical entities, e.g., products and resources, which are accompanied by a rich virtual counterpart, accessible at the global level, which connects all current and historical relevant information, about the properties of the object itself, its origin, the sensory context, etc. Figure 3: Agriculture 4.0. Source: own elaboration. The constituent elements are products (inputs, such as pesticides and fertilizers, mature agricultural products, harvests, shipments and orders, packaging, any ingredients for processing) that flow between transformations and actors (e.g., agricultural producers, product processors, traders) (Figure 5). In the Internet of Things (IoT) all kinds of devices-smart objects-are connected and interact with each other through local and global, often wireless network infrastructures [60; 61; 62; 63]. Therefore, precision agriculture results to be the most recent discipline of this development as an important driver for Big Data [23; 26; 64; 65]. Radical changes in farm management can be expected due to the access to clear information and decision-making abilities that before were not possible [66]. Consequently, farms have evolved, and each rural activity will transmit data via wireless transfer technology [23; 26; 64; 65]. The technical equipment of farms has reached today a comparable level to that of industries. The developing use of data announces a digital agricultural revolution in agriculture driven by several innovations [48; 67]. Advances in robotics have permitted a greater automation [26; 68] and the decreasing cost of sensor technology has allowed farmers to monitor factors, e.g., soil proprieties and animal movement in almost real-time circumstances [68]. Accessible and affordable computing power in this condition has created new decision support tools (e.g., on-tractor dashboards and mobile applications) for a better management practice [69; 70; 71]. Emerging Big Data analytical platforms, e.g., cloud computing and machine learning algorithms, drive artificial intelligence [26; 72; 73; 74; 71; 72; 74] and  
Figure 4: Virtualization of a supply chain management through the Internet of Things (IoT). Source:  
Figure 5: Agriculture 4.0. Structure of a management system (FMS) by virtualization of an agri-food chain. have supported a relevant growth in the volume, velocity, variety, and veracity of data generated in agriculture [26; 75; 76]. Subsequently, agricultural data are quickly providing a main driver not only of revolutions in output and the food chain, but also in environmental management [67; 75].