Current Concepts in Engineering Research and Technology Vol. 4

Digital agricultural extension is shifting from episodic information delivery to continuous, data-intensive interaction among farmers, advisers, public agencies, platform firms and other agri-food actors. This transition can improve the timeliness and personalisation of advice, yet it also creates governance problems because agronomic recommendations increasingly depend on the collection, linkage, inference and reuse of data about farms, households, locations, transactions and production decisions. This critical narrative review examines how agricultural data governance should be understood in the digital extension era, with particular attention to ownership, privacy, consent and farmer data sovereignty. Literature published from 1 January 2010 to 7 August 2026 was identified through multidisciplinary and agriculture-focused scholarly sources, complemented by authoritative policy and legal materials and citation searching. The evidence indicates that ownership is an intuitively attractive but legally and practically incomplete organising principle. Control often arises through contracts, technical architecture, confidentiality rules, intellectual-property claims, platform design and unequal bargaining power rather than a single property right in data. Privacy protection is similarly uneven because farm data can move across personal, household, business and non-personal categories, while aggregation and inference can create risks not visible at collection. Consent remains necessary in many settings but is frequently weakened by bundled terms, low comprehensibility, dependency on essential services and poorly specified secondary uses. The strongest emerging conception of farmer data sovereignty therefore concerns sustained practical capacity to understand, authorise, monitor, contest, port and revoke data uses, supported by enforceable rights and interoperable infrastructure. Empirical studies consistently connect willingness to share data with trust, transparency, perceived benefit, data type and recipient, although evidence remains geographically concentrated and institutionally heterogeneous. The review proposes a layered governance architecture combining rights baselines, purpose-bound authorisation, security, portability, accountable intermediaries, participatory oversight and accessible redress. Future research should test these mechanisms in real extension systems, especially among smallholders and under-represented regions, using longitudinal and comparative designs that measure both service benefits and distributional consequences.