The Food-Energy-Water-Climate (FEWC) nexus is a systems-based perspective that explicitly recognizes food, energy, water, and climate systems as both interconnected and interdependent, with context and scale dependent synergies and tradeoffs [1]. Such complexities may result in unintended feedbacks, latencies, and spillovers due to poorly designed natural resource governance [2].

Agriculture is intuitively a key component of the FEWC nexus and will be important to future human resilience. Recent advances in digital agriculture (DA) have boosted its importance to global sustainability via policy targeting and facilitation of outcome-based management [3,4]. Current DA technologies that include sensors, simulation modeling, or integrated approaches can gather data to interpret or model FEWC nexus dynamics, allowing for more timely or accurate management [5]. DA has already significantly decreased use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other inputs [6]. Basso and Antle [7] suggest that DA can also inform the design of governance that moves agriculture toward sustainable pathways. Here we propose that with the rapid deployment of DA, agricultural policy design should move from a focus on narrowly defined rules to new institutions allowing for farmer cooperation.

We refer here to rules as legal restraints that explicitly limit actions via external monitoring and enforcement. Rules as targeted solutions to FEWC nexus problems, such as pollution or over-appropriation of resources, frequently underperform, lead to unintended consequences, or even exacerbate issues [7], while arbitrarily picking winners and losers within a community. For example, a rule banning agricultural nutrient application during winter to decrease non-point source pollution, might increase nutrient loading to water bodies by forcing higher application rates during condensed windows. Such a rule might also have additional unintended impacts including greater use of energy, increased greenhouse gas emissions or changes in food availability. Arbitrary or badly designed rules undermine local knowledge and responsibility in managing resources [8], and may encourage blind adherence or illicit behavior.

Rules often assume that individuals are strictly economically self-interested and cannot work together to solve problems. Yet, many examples exist where individuals, including farmers, will cooperate long term when there is a mutual benefit [8]. Game theory can be helpful for understanding individuals’ decision-making, including the emergence of cooperative behavior in natural resource governance [9]. A hypothetical two-player game involving farmers can help illustrate current and future strategies with respect to the FEWC nexus. In this game, each farmer faces a simultaneous decision as to whether to adopt a conservation practice (e.g., planting cover crops, implementing nutrient management, using minimum tillage), here assumed to result in a decrease in payoffs via lower yield, an increased cost to implement, or both. Such a game is shown in Fig 1 with hypothetical economic payoffs for both farmers from possible decision combinations.

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Fig 1. Payoff Matrix of Farmer Conservation Adoption.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000092.g001

With lower yield or increased costs, the price of a commodity in a competitive market would rise with conservation practice adoption. A farmer choosing to “not conserve” (NC) profits when another farmer adopts a “conserve” (C) strategy by choosing to “free ride” or “cheat.” Game theory suggests that without the ability to effectively demonstrate past strategies and monitor future commitments, both farmers would simply expect the other to maximize payoffs and adapt their own strategy accordingly.

The game then moves to a noncooperative equilibrium where both farmers choose NC. This represents a scenario where payoffs reflect the imposition of rules, with both farmers receiving less, either through indirect impact of the rules on farm activities or direct cost of taxes or fees to implement. The farmers might reach a better mutual outcome by cooperating to protect the natural resource and choosing to conserve, thereby curtailing regulation, and splitting a greater overall payoff. The impediment to cooperation in this game is the farmers’ inability to communicate the mutual benefit. Left to skeptically predict the strategy of the other, this mirrors the classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” with both farmers lacking incentive to unilaterally change their NC strategy [9].

However, DA can be expected to fundamentally change this game by allowing farmers to communicate FEWC nexus outcomes. Farmers currently have a poor general understanding of how their actions impact natural resources [10]. DA facilitates rapid, low-cost assessment of farm productivity and environmental performance, furnishing communicable information that is the basis for social influence, commitments, and the development of trust-based cooperation [3]. DA also iteratively reinforces cooperation by facilitating cost effective within-group monitoring and enforcement of agreements. Observing greater potential payoffs and possible realization through cooperative commitments DA would rationally lead farmers to take collective action to escape the FEWC nexus “prisoner’s dilemma,” as long as rules do not prohibit or discourage them from doing so.

Current rule regimes have failed to manage the complexity of the FEWC nexus, while often imposing significant regulatory costs. Cooperative self-governance can improve FEWC nexus outcomes at lower societal cost. Yet, to realize this improvement future policies must be carefully designed to induce cooperation by promoting DA and engagement of farmer groups. Publicly supported facilitation may help in elucidating potential cooperative benefits through DA data analysis and interpretation, likely expediting the formation of groups and conservation commitments. Public/private partnerships with agribusinesses, community engagement and participatory design will also likely be key, but future research should focus on developing suites of techniques for promoting and operationalizing cooperative farmer groups.

The potential impact of DA on the strategic cooperation of farmers has not been accounted for. This is a policy oversight, as governance continues to focus on rules aimed at managing singular natural resource issues. However, farmer communities can increasingly account for all dimensions of the FEWC nexus, while integrating localized bio-physical conditions and socio-economic factors [11]. Governance at all levels can now be decentralized to allow for more effective and efficient localized cooperative self-governance. Too many rules will keep us trapped in the FEWC nexus prisoner’s dilemma, stifling the cooperation that DA could create.