Analysis of the Present Status and Future Prospects for Smart Agriculture Technologies in South Korea Using National R&D Project Data

Food security and its sovereignty have become among the most important key issues due to changes in the international situation. Regarding these issues, many countries now give attention to smart agriculture, which would increase production efficiency through a data-based system. The Korean government also has attempted to promote smart agriculture by 1) implementing the agri-food ICT (information and communications technology) policy, and 2) increasing the R&D budget by more than double in recent years. However, its endeavors only centered on large-scale farms which a number of domestic farmers rarely utilized in their farming. To promote smart agriculture more effectively, we diagnosed the government R&D trends of smart agriculture based on NTIS (National Science and Technology Information Service) data. We identified the research trends for each R&D period by analyzing three pieces of information: the regional information, research actor, and topic. Based on these findings, we could suggest systematic R&D directions and implications.