Animating the transition: How agriculture 5.0 revitalises agroecological principles

Agriculture is undergoing a rapid digital transformation that challenges its ecological, social, and ethical foundations. This study explores how the transition from two revolutions, from Agriculture 4.0 (A4.0) to Agriculture 5.0 (A5.0), redefines the relationship between technology and agroecology. The dominant approach of A4.0, driven by automation, big data, and artificial intelligence, has enhanced efficiency but missed many agroecological principles, mainly those contributing to secure social equity and responsibility. Emerging as a corrective paradigm, A5.0 seeks to integrate technological progress with agroecological principles that value the social and human dimension. Adopting a scoping review following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, scientific publications indexed in Scopus and CABI up to October 2025 were screened and coded to assess how current A5.0 research embeds the thirteen agroecological principles defined by the High-Level Panel of Experts in 2019. A total of 136 documents were analysed through bibliometric and thematic synthesis. Results show that A5.0 represents a philosophical and structural evolution beyond the efficiency-oriented logic of A4.0, integrating distributed computing, explainable artificial intelligence, digital twins, and collaborative robotics within ecologically restorative and socially inclusive frameworks. However, while A5.0 strengthens resource efficiency, resilience, and certain social segments through open-source technologies and participatory design, gaps remain in policy coherence, emotional engagement, and human–machine co-learning. To address these, the study proposes two complementary agroecological principles, cognitive symbiosis and emotional ecology, emphasising shared intelligence and affective stewardship between humans, machines, and ecosystems. Overall, Agriculture 5.0 reframes digitalisation as a human-ecological partnership that can operationalise agroecology’s ethical goals if governed by inclusion, transparency, and regeneration rather than control and optimisation.