ABSTRACT
Public interest in where food comes from and how it is produced, processed, and distributed has increased over the last few decades, with even greater focus emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mounting evidence and experience point to disturbing weaknesses in our food systems' abilities to support human livelihoods and wellbeing, and alarming long-term trends regarding both the environmental footprint of food systems and mounting vulnerabilities to shocks and stressors. How can we tackle the "wicked problems” embedded in a food system? More specifically, how can convergent research programs be designed and resulting knowledge implemented to increase inclusion, sustainability, and resilience within these complex systems, support widespread contributions to and acceptance of solutions to these challenges, and provide concrete benchmarks to measure progress and understand tradeoffs among strategies along multiple dimensions? This article introduces and defines food systems informatics (FSI) as a tool to enhance equity, sustainability, and resilience of food systems through collaborative, user-driven interaction, negotiation, experimentation, and innovation within food systems. Specific benefits we foresee in further development of FSI platforms include the creation of capacity-enabling verifiable claims of sustainability, food safety, and human health benefits relevant to particular locations and products;the creation of better incentives for the adoption of more sustainable land use practices and for the creation of more diverse agro-ecosystems;the wide-spread use of improved and verifiable metrics of sustainability, resilience, and health benefits;and improved human health through better diets.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to test the moderating effect of gender on the relationship between the Big Five personality traits of agriculture and food science senior students and their entrepreneurial intention. For this purpose, the study employed an online survey, which was directed to senior students in the agriculture and food science program at four public universities in Saudi Arabia. Out of the 450 forms distributed, 410 provided usable responses for analysis. This process yielded an answer ratio of 91%. The findings of PLS-SEM showed that the Big Five personality traits have a significant positive influence on students' intent toward entrepreneurship, except for neuroticism, which was found to have a negative but insignificant influence. The results of moderating effect analysis showed no significant moderating influences of gender on the link between two traits, i.e., agreeableness and neuroticism and entrepreneurship intention. On the other side, gender was found to have a significant moderating role in the relationship between the four other traits, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experiences, and entrepreneurial intention. Male students have a more moderating influence in relation to extraversion and conscientiousness than females do on entrepreneurial intention, whereas female students have a more moderating influence regarding openness to experiences than males on entrepreneurship intention. The results confirm that to ensure a sustainable agriculture ecosystem, each gender should receive appropriate development programs to strengthen their personal traits to stimulate entrepreneurial intention.
ABSTRACT
Demographic, economic, and environmental issues, including climate change events, aging population, growing urban-rural disparity, and the COVID-19 pandemic, contribute to vulnerabilities in agricultural production and food systems. South Korea has designated smart agriculture as a national strategic investment, expanding investment in research and development (R&D) to develop and commercialize convergence technologies, thus extending sustainable smart agriculture and strengthening global competitiveness. Hence, this study probes the status of smart agricultural R&D investment from the perspectives of public funds, research areas, technologies, regions, organizations, and stakeholders. It examines 5646 public R&D projects worth USD 1408.5 million on smart agriculture in 17 regions and eight technology clusters from 2015 to 2021. Further, it proposes a pool of potential collaborative networks via a case study of strawberry, a representative veritable crop inspiring smart agriculture, to demonstrate the study framework’s usefulness in promoting smart agriculture and establishing a sustainable R&D collaboration ecosystem. The proposed framework, accordingly, allows stakeholders to understand and monitor the status of R&D investment from various perspectives. Moreover, given the insight into the tasks belonging to technical areas and regions that require sustainable cooperation in smart agriculture, central and local governments develop policies to reinforce sustainable smart-farming models.