Digital Agriculture: Past, Present, and Future

Digital agriculture, as an innovative paradigm that integrates modern information technology with agricultural production, holds strategic significance for global agricultural modernization through its developmental trajectory and transformation pathway. This paper systematically reviews the evolution, technological architecture, multidimensional application scenarios, and existing challenges of digital agriculture, and based on trends in technological convergence, proposes a future roadmap. Our study demonstrates that digital agriculture has progressed through three stages, that is technological germination, mechanization, and information integration, and an intelligent leap, gradually forming a technological ecosystem that integrates Internet of Things sensing, big data decision‐making, artificial intelligence control, and blockchain traceability, thereby significantly enhancing production efficiency and resource utilization accuracy, in other words, intelligent agriculture. However, due to technological heterogeneity, ambiguous responsibilities arising from insufficient data governance, and the imbalance between technological complexity and smallholder accessibility, compatibility barriers continue to impede large‐scale implementation. Future innovations such as lightweight edge computing, cross‐modal data interoperability, and human–machine collaborative interactions are essential to build a multidimensional “technology‐economy‐society” framework, shifting digital agriculture from an efficiency‐first approach to one of inclusive, sustainable development that underpins global food security and ecological agriculture.