Theoretical and methodological aspects of digitalization in agriculture

Abstract The article discusses the essence of the basic approaches to the definition of the concept “digital economy”. There is a lack of elaboration on the issues of establishinh the mechanism of transition from the traditional economy to the digital one and justification of the criteria allowing to fix the moment of this transition. A critical analysis of the contents of the program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation” is conducted in the paper. The content of the categories “digital platform” and “digital ecosystem” is disclosed. Certain provisions regulating the conditions for implementing the digital transformation of economic systems are given. It is noted that the present stage is marked with the formation of the theoretical and methodological basis of the digital economy; insufficient attention is paid to the issues of the digital development of individual branches of social production, including agriculture. The paper argues that certain limitations on achieving the potential for the digitization of agriculture are imposed by the current structure of the agrarian sector of the economy of the Russian Federation. Therefore, it is highly necessary to adopt a state strategy to overcome the information backwardness of the agrarian sector and the formation of basic conditions for the initiation of the digital transformation of the most technologically advanced economic entities of the agrarian sector and the industry as a whole. The paper provides a list of basic information management tasks, the solution of which would create prerequisites for transferring agriculture to digital technologies, along with the principles reflecting the basic provisions of the formation of digital agriculture. The paper provides a directional digitalization model, which assumes active regulatory influence of the state on the processes of designing and developing industry digital platforms and ecosystems and the formation of macroeconomic conditions for creating and introducing digital technologies into business practice.