Overview

Achieving sustainability in the agri-food sector requires more than incremental changes to farming practices; it demands systemic transformation across entire supply chains. As the sector grapples with climate change, declining biodiversity, social inequality, and shifting consumer demands, digitalisation has emerged as a critical enabler of transformative sustainable practices. In the Agriculture 4.0 era, technologies such as IoT, AI, and blockchain offer tools to enhance efficiency and improve transparency, unlock opportunities to co-create new value propositions, and support data-driven decision-making. However, they also raise concerns around data ownership, privacy, and governance—particularly for the farmers central to many agri-food supply chains.

This paper examines the role of Dedicated Digitalisation Cooperatives (DDCs) as governance structures designed to address these challenges within digital innovation ecosystems. Through a case study of JoinData, a federated cooperative in the Dutch dairy sector, we explore how DDCs facilitate effective data exchange while maintaining trust, transparency, and farmer agency. Unlike traditional cooperatives focused on product development and market positioning, JoinData is solely dedicated to digitalisation, enabling it to allocate specialized resources to manage data governance and interoperability.

Our research aims to explore how DDCs might mitigate power asymmetries in data ecosystems, promote inclusive digital transformation, and potentially support more sustainable agri-food systems. This paper contributes to theoretical discussions on cooperative governance in the digital era and offers insights into the potential of DDCs to enable sustainability transitions through digital innovation.