# The Impact of the 4.0 Paradigm in the Italian Agricultural Sector: A Descriptive Survey
## 4 Results
### RQ3: What Are the Main Benefits Perceived in Adopting Agri 4.0 Solutions? Figure 10 shows a boxplot that compares the benefit (divided into 14 different classes of benefit) obtained from the implementation of 4.0 solutions by users with the expected benefit by those who are not currently using any of the 4.0 solutions proposed in the questionnaire. This analysis highlights how the expectations of nonusers exceed the reality of users in terms of the level of benefit. This result deserves a more specific analysis; in Figure 10, the average of the benefit obtained and that expected from the two types of different actors, here unpacked in the 14 different obtainable benefits, is visualized. Figure 10 also represents the average benefit perceived by large users, which means those users who are currently operating many solutions (above eight different solutions). Figure 11 represents what was previously summarized in Figure 10, providing more detail regarding each benefit presented to the respondents. It is interesting to note that, for all benefits (except for the benefit of reducing water consumption), the respondents who are users of 4.0 solutions present an average level of benefit lower than the average benefit that nonusers expect. In particular, it is possible to see how this gap is wider for \"increase in sales price,\" which reports a rather low value (1.7 average value) for users while showing a potentially higher benefit for nonusers. In general, the benefits that have brought the most benefit to the sample under analysis are \"lower consumption of technical inputs,\" \"lower water consumption,\" and \"soil quality improvement.\" However, it is also interesting to notice an upward trend. As previously stated, the average of the users is clearly lower than the expected benefit of the nonusers, but it is also true that the average of the large users (in this case, those respondents declaring that they use eight or more different solutions) increases considerably to the level of the expectations. A takeaway from this trend is that to reach (at least at the level of the average) the level of benefit expectation, it is necessary to use several solutions in parallel to exploit the joint work to achieve the desired benefits. Figure 10: Boxplot graph of the level of benefit between users and nonusers. To gain a better understanding of the differences between users and nonusers, a ranking of benefit levels for users and expectations for nonusers was drawn up in descending order to identify the relative position of each benefit in these two lists. The results are shown in Table 12. The columns of \"position\" represent the relative position for users' benefits, and, in brackets, the position difference for nonusers' expected benefits is given. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline
**Benefit** & **Position: Users** & **Position: Nonusers** \\ \hline Lower consumption of technical inputs & 1 & 2 (\(-\)1) \\ \hline Lower water consumption & 2 & 14 (\(-\)12) \\ \hline Soil quality improvement & 3 & 1 (+2) \\ \hline Increased product quality & 4 & 3 (+1) \\ \hline Reducing water pollution & 5 & 6 (\(-\)1) \\ \hline Increased safety at work & 6 & 10 (\(-\)4) \\ \hline Reduction of air pollution (CO\({}_{2}\), N\({}_{2}\)O,... ) & 7 & 7 (\(\cdot\)) \\ \hline Cost reduction & 8 & 4 (+4) \\ \hline Increased yields & 9 & 5 (+4) \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 12: Relative position of benefits. Figure 11: Benefits of Agri 4.0 solutions. The message that emerges from Table 12 is indicative of whether the various benefits perceived by users are in line (at least from the point of view of relative position) with expectations or not. Maintaining this approach but aggregating the benefits by cluster, we find interesting results. As depicted in Figure 12, it is possible to notice that the \"people\" and \"planet\" clusters have an average position in line between the two samples. The \"profit\" cluster is a different matter. In this case, the analysis should be divided into subclusters of efficiency and effectiveness.