# The Impact of the 4.0 Paradigm in the Italian Agricultural Sector: A Descriptive Survey
## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
The current study aimed to map the state-of-the-art in Agri 4.0 within Italian farms through a descriptive survey, here adopting the perspectives of the awareness and adoption level, understanding which benefits users value the most and the differences between nonuser clusters, as well as identifying the critical factors and challenges that impact a company's adoption level regarding Agri 4.0 solutions. A large sample of 670 agricultural companies in Italy was analyzed. In particular, the digital solutions presented to respondents refer to five different clusters: DSS software, monitoring systems, systems for precision activities, mapping systems, and autonomous systems. In addition, this study considered the benefits by clustering the specific items by referring to the TBL, that is,  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline \hline
**Challenge** & **Position: Users** & **Position: Nonusers** \\ \hline Limited or no interoperability & 1 & 1 (-) \\ Lack of connectivity & 2 & 5 (-3) \\ Lack of return on investment & 3 & 7 (-4) \\ \hline Insufficient assistance & 4 & 6 (-2) \\ Limited or no flexibility & 5 & 4 (+1) \\ Lack of appropriate skills in the company & 6 & 3 (+3) \\ Difficulty of use & 7 & 2 (+5) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 13: Relative position of challenges.  
Figure 15: Aggregate positioning of obstacles.  
economic, social, and environmental benefits, while analyzing several kinds of challenges: technological, economic, implementation, and cultural and organizational.  
At a general level, our study shows that Italian farms display a heterogeneously distributed level of knowledge of the proposed solutions, but few farms know more than one solution in depth. Moreover, the current study shows that some control variables influence the level of awareness more than others; as turnover and cultivable area increase, an increase in the average level of awareness of Agri 4.0 solutions can be seen. The first is the level of awareness of each digital solution, which is still not pervasive over all the different solutions identified. Extensive knowledge of the solutions is still far from common. Above all, it is possible to see that the percentage of those who claim to know examples of practical implementation is low for each solution. The other important point is the degree of adoption. Here, the key message is that the average level of adoption increases as the turnover and size of the arable land increase. The level of maturity, therefore, is still low on average, and the market is not very dynamic if smaller companies are more out of the change process. In fact, smaller companies have less capacity to invest, and in line with the result of the barriers to adoption (which puts the economic problem at the top), this leads to a greater shift in adoption toward larger companies. At the same time, a similar increasing trend can be noticed in the degree of adoption. Although the average penetration rate is not particularly high, companies that have embarked on the journey to Agri 4.0 transformation have generally perceived lower barriers than companies that have yet to begin this journey. Finally, the present article has also investigated the benefits and potential obstacles to implementing Agri 4.0 solutions. The analysis shows that the main benefits perceived by the user are the reduction of technical inputs and water, which, in turn, benefit the entrepreneur economically but can also be said to have a positive impact on the environment. It is also interesting to note that the main problem encountered is the limited, even lack of, interoperability between 4.0 systems in the field. This obstacle is the point at which the actors and technology providers of the Agri 4.0 value chain must focus on to extract the maximum value from the digitalization of agricultural systems.