Most farmers globally could make their farms more productive; few are limited by ambient availabilities of light energy and water. Similarly the sustainability of farming practices offers large scope for innovation and improvement. However, conventional ‘top-down’ Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKISs) are commonly failing to maintain significant progress in either productivity or sustainability because multifarious and complex agronomic interactions thwart accurate predictions of site-specific best practices. A revolution in knowledge generation and exchange is therefore needed to realize the potentials of individual farms and fields. This farmer-centric revolution will best arise from coordinated and widely shared farmer-centric monitoring, benchmarking and experimentation. These all require more coordination, care and quality control than can generally be provided by farmers so they must be driven by investments in farm facilitators and their training, as well as development of easy-to-use, supportive digital platforms.

Initiatives for farmer-centric knowledge generation and exchange have occurred across the world but past models have not generally been targeted at eliciting site-specific progress, and they have been weak in fostering comprehensive feedback between farmer and researcher. Models enabling engagement by the largest number of farms and the most thorough feedback are expected to engender fastest agronomic progress. Whilst digital tools such as are currently used in ‘precision farming’ are seen as essential to this fast feedback, it is suggested that most emphasis should be placed on creating the social infrastructures that will maintain communication channels throughout the new ‘bottom-up’ AKIS.