Background
Despite the availability of smart sensor-based solutions in land-based agriculture, their universal adoption and the potential to address the needs of end users is still limited. On one hand, small agritech providers focus only on a single vertical aspect of a complex precision farming ecosystem and do not offer a holistic unified product. Existing solutions are often based on home-made non-standard data processing architectures, with little interoperability across individual vertical elements. To make use of the collected data, farmers must manually correlate disjoint datasets. On the other hand, large agritech vendors, albeit with an interoperable ecosystem in place, offer generic non-tailored solutions, whereas farmers need information and decision support fine-tuned to their actual needs.
R&D work
To tackle these challenges, it is required to conduct R&D work to enable:
- interoperability across siloed vertical agritech services and data sources
- end-to-end transformation from disjoint raw datasets into a semantically interoperable open data space
- 'one-stop shop' user experience via an integrated farm management platform for tailored decision support
Expected results and benefits for the agritech sector
As a result, individual agritech data sources will be converted into interoperable data assets in a common shared data space and offered to end users in an understandable and tailored manner. Such enriched decision support will allow farmers to maximise productivity and profitability in farm and business operations with reduced manual efforts and costs. To achieve this, the SMARAGD consortium brings together three pillars of precision farming:
- sensor-based environmental monitoring
- aerial spraying and inspection using drones
- harvesting robots
This way, the project will tackle the challenges in a holistic manner, aiming to make the results re-usable by the wider agritech community. Raspberry production will be the pilot to validate the project results at one of the largest berry producers in Norway.