# Towards Climate Smart Farming--A Reference Architecture for Integrated Farming Systems
## 4 The Expected Benefits of Mifarm-CSA Architecture  
CSA addresses the challenges which climate change poses to agricultural production. MiFarm-CSA constitutes an efficient CSA-driven architecture which forms a user-oriented, social-aware and ecological platform, deployed as a service. Its main benefits are outlined as follows:  
* Increasing agricultural productivity and income while also enhancing resilience or adaptation of livelihoods and ecosystems towards climate extremes. Through the IDCON, SECF and MFaS layers, the proposed architecture exploits multi-disciplinary, on-field and off-field data, to train the novel DSS, thereby enabling it to make optimal decisions, which are expected to boost MFS productivity and stakeholders' incomes. Moreover, through DiMaRa, MiFarm-CSA is anticipated to provide MFS the flexibility to face uncertain climate and market conditions.
* Increasing synergies among different farming systems by adopting new data collection and monitoring technologies, such as smart sensors, robots, UAVs, advanced tracking systems, long-range IoT-enabled sensors, middleware and gateways. The IDCON layer provides the cutting-edge technologies for applications in MFS: IoT sensors, devices, modern UAVs and FANETs, which inspire to be fully autonomous and multi-collective, supporting, advanced processing and integration functionalities and are capable of covering large-scale areas for providing big volumes of data in near real time. The autonomy is twofold: the energy autonomy will be accomplished by  
Figure 3: MiFarm-CSA Architecture.  
deploying energy harvesting techniques for recharging sensors and UAVs and by defining a pilot-sensitive energy-budget approach for each data collection technology.
* Speeding up the establishment of a community of practice and dynamic methodology in designing, developing and evaluating mixed and integrated farming systems. MiFarm-CSA adopts innovative human factor approaches and methodologies to champion social and behavioral aspects and to prioritize the role of the human in the technological development. By exploiting SCOPE in the proposed architecture, the aim is to facilitate a comparison between the current ways in which mixed farming and agroforestry are conducted and future ways which better account for the socio-technical system as described by SCOPE. This whole approach enables MiFarm-CSA to assess the inadequacies of the current treatment of social and behavioral issues and ensure that the emerged outcomes are built around the identified social and behavioral aspects of mixed farming and agroforestry. CoP will involve a multi-actor and trans-disciplinary group of end users. SLO relates to the continued acceptance of a set of business practices or operating procedures by a stakeholders. Moreover, SLO ensures that the technical innovations can be supported by sustained social and behavioral change.
* Forming a basis for the creation of a conceptual framework to analyze crop-livestock integration by fostering core interactions among animals, grasslands and crops, developing metabolic analysis of material flows, devising a biodiversity approach for the development of integrated crop-livestock systems and promoting social resources and stakeholder interactions.
* Prescribing a rich suite of user-friendly MFS applications and services for fostering the optimal combination of production, accurate climate change estimations and optimal decisions on local and national levels.