# The Impact of the 4.0 Paradigm in the Italian Agricultural Sector: A Descriptive Survey
## 4 Results
### RQ4: What Are the Main Challenges Perceived in Adopting Agri 4.0 Solutions? The analysis aimed to describe the barriers to implementing 4.0 systems in agriculture and expected difficulty in overcoming these barriers. In this paragraph, the aim is to replicate the structure of analysis presented in the previous research question, replicating the same type of analysis to identify analogies between the two research questions. As a first analysis, Figure 13 represents the level of challenge declared by respondents, dividing the sample between users and nonusers, with users defining their perceived level and nonusers defining their expectations of the proposed challenge. The analysis of the boxplot depicted in Figure 13 contrasts with the analysis seen for benefits. In this case, on average, users experience a lower level of obstacles than nonusers. However, the analysis is at an aggregate level, and one cannot see the obstacles one by one. For this reason, the analysis of the level per obstacle has also been replicated (Figure 14). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline \hline
**Benefit** & **Position: Users** & **Position: Nonusers** \\ \hline Lower consumption of technical inputs & 1 & 2 (\(-\)1) \\ \hline Lower water consumption & 2 & 14 (\(-\)12) \\ \hline Cost reduction & 8 & 4 (+4) \\ \hline Increased yields & 9 & 5 (+4) \\ \hline Reduced machinery usage & 10 & 12 (\(-\)2) \\ \hline Reduction of physical work fatigue & 11 & 9 (+2) \\ \hline Simplification in the cultivation decisions to be made & 12 & 11 (+1) \\ \hline Reduced time spent on bureaucratic tasks & 13 & 13 (-) \\ \hline Increase in sales prices & 14 & 8 (+6) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 12: _Cont._  
Figure 12: Aggregate positioning of benefits. In this case, unlike the analysis carried out for the benefits, there is not the same trend, and the analysis depicted in Figure 14 contrasts with the findings of the previous research question. In this case, it is significant that each of the barriers has a lower challenge level found by users compared with the expectations of nonusers. In addition, the trend for those who use many different solutions in parallel does not lead to a particular increase or decrease in the challenge level for each obstacle proposed, thus identifying a constant trend in the challenge level as the number of solutions used increases but with an increase in the variability of the level per item, as can be seen in Figure 14.  
To better understand the challenge level and relationship for each item in the list between users and nonusers, a ranking of the items from the highest level of perceived challenge to the lowest level was again drawn up (Table 13). Figure 14: Challenges with Agri 4.0 solutions. Figure 13: Boxplot graph of level of challenge between users and nonusers. In contrast to the same table presented for benefits, in this case, a higher position corresponds to a more serious problem for respondents. The first important consideration that is possible to see from Table 13 is that limited or no interoperability is at the top of both the problems encountered by users and expectations of respondents who do not use any Agriculture 4.0 solution, demonstrating the centrality of the issue for Agri 4.0 and, more generally, in the 4.0 paradigm. Furthermore, in this case, it is interesting to compare the clusters, as carried out in the benefits, and compare the relative position in the case of user response and expectations of nonusers. As presented in Figure 15, in this case, economic obstacles hold a higher position, so the perceived problem is greater than the expectations of nonusers; here, even four positions differ between the two types of respondents. As far as the technology category is concerned, the position is relatively stable between the two samples. It is also interesting to note that technological challenges rank first among the problems encountered by users.