Marinello, F., Department of Land Environment Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova, Legnaro, Italy

Bramley, R.G.V., Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Waite Campus, Urrbrae, Australia

Fountas, S., Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University of Athens, Athens, Greece

Guo, H., College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

Karkee, M., Center for Precision and Automated Agricultural Systems, Washington State University, Prosser, United States

Martínez-Casasnovas, J.A., Research Group in AgroICT and Precision Agriculture, University of Lleida, Spain

Paraforos, D.S., Institute of Agricultural Engineering, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany

Sartori, L., Department of Land Environment Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova, Legnaro, Italy

Sørensen, C.G., Department of Engineering, Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus, Denmark

Stenberg, B., Department of Soil and Environment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden

Sudduth, K., US Department of Agriculture, University of Missouri, Columbia, United States

Tisseyre, B., Montpellier SupAgro, Irstea, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France

Vellidis, G., Crop and Soil Sciences Department, University of Georgia, Tifton, United States

Vougioukas, S.G., Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, United States

The growing availability and capabilities of sensing and communication infrastructures such as monitoring stations, proximal and remote sensing technologies, geolocation systems, and standard communication protocols, along with apparently decreasing costs of the same technologies are pushing widespread collection, implementation, transmission and use of digitized information in agriculture. Such an uncontrolled process poses questions on sustainability of the virtual environment (i.e. a software-based space) where such processes take place. The aim of the present work is to introduce a digitization footprint (DF), which parameterizes the amount of digital information so as to quantify the specific or general use of digital or processing information in terms of volumes, time, efforts or costs invested for data storage, processing or transfer. Such a digitization footprint can be directly related to the availability and suitability of the digital resources in terms of costs (storage, transfer, processing, cloud computing), and speed (processing, upload, download), and can help define pathways for effective and widespread development. © Wageningen Academic Publishers 2019