**6. Challenges and future trends**

Future trends and challenges in the development and adoption of PA practices will demand new technical skills and knowledge, and a different mindset among farmers and end users. From the current user perspective, the adoption of PA is difficult as farmers are comfortable with tried and true historical production practices. Hightower [119] indicated that this mindset creates challenges, and it is difficult to overcome such mental barriers to adopt PA. High cost, lack of perceived benefits, and skills, expertise, and capability required for farmers or end users are considered barriers to the adoption of PA [120]. The potential barriers to PA adoption are often not fully understood or treated seriously enough by the front-line agriculture professionals [121]. The large-scale adoption of PA requires the timely acquisition of low-cost, high-quality soil and crop yield maps [79]. While the benefits of autonomous crop equipment are many, and have the potential to revolutionize PA, its widespread adoption will be less likely unless farmers find them profitable [12]. PA in many developing countries is still considered a concept. Therefore, it is vital to promote the public and private sectors' concomitant role and strategic support in promoting its rapid adoption. PA adoption is dependent on access to large amounts of reliable data; however, it is crucial to limit the gap between acquiring this information and utilizing it effectively in making management decisions for production agriculture [39].

Today, the trend toward PA applications in other domains includes precision animal/live-stock management, precision turf management, precision pasture and range management, and precision tree management [46]. During recent years, the agricultural community has become familiar with application of the new technologies from other industries. For example, IoT, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing are beginning to appear as part of PA services and applications. IoT describes the interconnection of different physical objects through the Internet or other communications networks. In IoT, objects are embedded with sensors, onboard processing capabilities, software, to transfer data *via* the network without human interaction [122]. The application of IoT in agriculture was reported in the greenhouse setting [123], while other uses have also been reported for precision farming and farm management systems [13, 124]. The application of IoT in agriculture helps farmers to manage agricultural activities, control their farms remotely, minimize human efforts, and save time while increasing crop yields and benefits [123–125]. Further smart UAVs coupled with IoT and cloud computing technologies, support the development of sustainable smart agriculture [126]. Another concern is the security and privacy of data and information produced by the PA technologies given its economic value to farmers [127]. Therefore, it is important to assign ownership to these data and work products, so that those entities responsible for this information share in value creation [57]. This is one of the major concepts to be sorted out to ensure the successful implementation and adoption of PA.
