Addressing challenges in agriculture: Exploring smart farming technologies to support future farming practices

Climate change, declining public perception, and growing sustainability demands are transforming the agricultural sector. Smart farming technologies (SFTs) offer solutions by leveraging digital tools and data-driven applications to enhance efficiency, sustainability, and decision-making. However, their adoption remains limited because of high costs, data privacy concerns, and insufficient training and support. This qualitative study explores the challenges farmers face when adopting SFTs, and the capabilities that agricultural technology providers must develop to support them. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 farmers and farm managers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The interview guide was iteratively designed using the jobs-to-be-done framework and dynamic capabilities theory, focusing on nine farmer jobs in SFT adoption and five key provider capabilities. The findings show that farmers struggle with system integration, data management, and decision-making complexities. They require support for platformization, data acquisition, decision support systems, knowledge transfer, and data security. Providers must strengthen these capabilities to address farmers’ needs and foster trust. This study contributes methodologically by aligning customer activities with organizational capabilities. Managerial implications emphasize customer-centric innovation, whereas future research should address universal data standards, stronger data security, and the transition toward Agriculture 5.0.