• Adoption
• Agriculture 4.0
• Barriers
• Smart farming

Purpose – To understand the existing adoption drivers/ barriers and the clues of a related low adoption of 4.0 technologies in agri-food production, through the existing literature.
Design/methodology/approach Systematic review, bibliometric analysis
Findings –We identified seven dimensions that can answer to what drives smart technology adoption in agri-food production: farmer’s age, farmer’s educational level, ICT infrastructures, farm size and type of harvest, technology costs (i.e., economic barriers), policies/incentives and legal issues; business models. Among them, however, political and technological infrastructures play a more important role than farm size and technology costs.

Originality/value This review updates the existing state of the art on the barriers of smart farm technologies adoption of the last 6 years. The focus of the review is on topics that are covered previously on other researches but without a systematic approach. In addition, the review focuses more on enabling technology for production than enabling technology for selling and marketing.