agronomy Article The Economic Results of Investing in Precision Agriculture in Durum Wheat Production: A Case Study in Central Italy Adele Finco , Giorgia Bucci , Matteo Belletti and Deborah Bentivoglio *   Citation: Finco, A.; Bucci, G.; Belletti, M.; Bentivoglio, D. The Economic Results of Investing in Precision Agriculture in Durum Wheat Production: A Case Study in Central Italy. Agronomy 2021, 11, 1520. https://doi.org/10.3390/ agronomy11081520 Academic Editor: Spiros Mouzakitis Received: 23 June 2021 Accepted: 28 July 2021 Published: 30 July 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences (D3A), Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM), 60131 Ancona, Italy; a.finco@univpm.it (A.F.); g.bucci@pm.univpm.it (G.B.); m.belletti@univpm.it (M.B.) * Correspondence: d.bentivoglio@staff.univpm.it; Tel.: +39-071-220-4179 Abstract: Today, precision agriculture technologies (PATs) can be considered a tool for the man- agement of the farm which allows the agricultural entrepreneur to optimise inputs, reduce costs, and offer the best quantitative and qualitative agricultural products. In Italy, the number of digital farmers is still low; therefore, it is not yet possible to assess with certainty the actual economic benefits that technologies bring to the farm. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes, through the analysis of a case study, an assessment of the economic efficiency of an Italian cereal farm that has invested in precision agriculture. The results reveal that, unlike what is reported in the literature, after the technological adoption, the farm keeps both the yield and variable costs stable. However, the major benefit is recorded in the decrease in labour costs (−20%) and in the reduction of pesticides (−53%). The increase in the quantity of nitrogen (+11%) and of seed distributed in the field (+5%) indicates that, in the face of a significant increase in total costs due to the capital invested in technology, the farm aims to intensify production rather than reduce agricultural inputs. Keywords: case study; durum wheat; economic profitability; precision agriculture; sustainability 1. Introduction In Europe, the cereals sector is not only facing challenges structurally, as well as financially and climatically, which have been responsible for the decline in income expe- rienced by cereal producers in recent years; they include volatility of the market, scarce land availability, and climate change issues. The Italian agricultural context stands out for the presence of traditional low-tech farms, which operate within a political framework, characterised by income support and protected markets. In order to gain profitability and sustainability with an increase in yields accompanied by a reduction in their operating costs, EU grain growers started to digitalise agriculture through the introduction of preci- sion agriculture technologies. This transformation represents an epochal challenge that cannot be taken up by all the farms in the sector because, as already said, it is accompanied by a substantial complexification of farm management. Thus, this dynamic leads to a progressive exit from the market of smaller farms with the concentration of arable land management into larger production units. It must be clear that the need to increase the production scale depends on the need to invest substantial amounts of financial resources in multiyear assets to fulfil the modernisation required by the market under increasing technical and environmental constraints. The overall effect of this remarkable process of structural change requires farmers to both invest in technological change and, consequently, train in order to increase their skills in terms of management control [1]. Within the agricultural sector, digital technolo- gies mainly develop through the application of precision agriculture (PA). It emerged in the early 1990s when this technique was only focused on the study and management of spatial in-field variability. There is no broadly accepted definition of PA and starting Agronomy 2021, 11, 1520. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11081520 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/agronomy