Agriculture faces the critical challenge of balancing productivity with resource conservation. The guiding theme of AGRITECHNICA 2025 – Touch Smart Efficiency – addresses this challenge by showcasing how digital technologies, automation, and artificial intelligence can enhance the efficiency of agricultural processes while preserving natural resources.
Efficiency, in the spirit of Touch Smart Efficiency, means not only adopting new technologies but also advancing and interconnecting existing systems to improve workflows from sowing to harvest. High performance, combined with innovative and efficient technical innovations, offers solutions to the challenges faced by modern agricultural enterprises.
These challenges are immense – both in terms of protecting natural resources and ensuring global food security. Calculations by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Göttingen make it clear: to feed a global population expected to reach around ten billion by 2050, annual production growth of approximately two percent is required. This target was missed in the past decade. While some regions of the world are experiencing dynamic growth, the EU-27 – despite favorable production conditions – has seen declines.
DLG is taking responsibility by adopting a new guiding principle: Sustainable Productivity Growth. This principle embraces an integrated understanding of production growth alongside key sustainability goals such as climate protection, biodiversity, and animal welfare. Successfully implementing sustainable productivity growth in agricultural practice requires active support for technological innovation.
AGRITECHNICA provides vital momentum in this direction. Its international focus strengthens the competitiveness of agriculture and promotes progress toward sustainable productivity growth. The theme Touch Smart Efficiency builds on this: at the Digital Farm Center, farmers, manufacturers, and researchers are brought together to exchange ideas on drone technologies, AI-based farm management systems, and solutions in automation and precision farming. The goal is to increase the practical applicability of modern technologies, expand IT competence on farms, and improve the user-friendliness of new systems.
Touch Smart Efficiency – the fusion of human expertise with cutting-edge technologies – makes a key contribution to sustainable productivity growth. Yet the most important contribution still comes from people themselves: the farmer, with professional know-how and decision-making power, remains irreplaceable in the living system of agriculture, which is shaped by unpredictable factors such as weather developments.
Visit AGRITECHNICA 2025 and experience firsthand how Touch Smart Efficiency is paving the way toward a future-proof agriculture – innovative, sustainable, and practical.
Hubertus Paetow, DLG President
