REVIEW article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
The Values, Challenges, and Strategies of AI in Empowering Sustainable Livelihoods for Farmers
Provisionally accepted
- Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract: Smart agriculture has gained significant global attention in recent years, capturing considerable attention from the academic community. However, existing research has mainly focused on the values of artificial intelligence (AI) in rural society and agricultural systems, ignoring its deep impact on farmers' livelihoods. This oversight risks marginalizing farmers, a crucial subject of global agriculture and food systems, in the context of AI development. This study offers a literature review of the values, challenges, and strategies of AI in empowering farmers' sustainable livelihoods through the sustainable livelihoods framework(SLF), explores how AI, as an external technical factor, influences the internal system's resilience. Analyzing 129 studies from a narrative review, our findings indicate that AI can promote farmers' natural resource management capabilities, including land, water, and climate, facilitate precise agricultural decision-making, strengthen rural social networks, modernize production tools, and improve access to microcredit. AI enhances farmers' natural, human, social, physical, and financial capital resilience. However, AI in empowering farmers faces several challenges: the limited adaptability of AI in complex agricultural environments, the widening digital divide, the monopoly of AI platforms, the high costs, and rural financial limitations. We advocate for designing targeted and adapted AI agricultural tools, enhancing farmers' AI literacy, building a multi-stakeholder collaboration network, improving the accessibility and universality of AI in agriculture, and strengthening the rural credit system. This study innovatively integrates the SLF with AI, breaking through existing research that only focuses on the value of AI for agricultural production. It comprehensively summarizes the values, challenges, and strategies of AI for farmers' sustainable livelihoods, proposes a new farmer-centered perspective for AI agricultural research, constructs a systematic governance framework for AI in agriculture, and provides systematic policy insights for promoting inclusive and sustainable development of smart agriculture.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, farmer, smart agriculture, AI in Agriculture, sustainablelivelihood, Narrative review
Received: 30 Sep 2025; Accepted: 11 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yuan and Sun. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yong Sun, sunyong@gzhu.edu.cn
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.