Welcome to a vibrant research, innovation, development and deployment IoT ecosystem across Europe!

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the use of digital technologies as tools to contribute to the wide sustainability of the agri-food sector. Precision/smart farming, Agriculture 4.0, and the like are concepts no longer attached to academic research, but they have been making their way through the market and the real life of farmers during the past years. Smart farming techniques are being successfully applied in areas like optimization in the use of resources (water, fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), monitoring of animal health and wellbeing, and decision making. Together with the increasing robotization of farming labour, they are having a positive impact in productivity and environmental footprint, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and climate change strategies.

In addition, digital technologies play a strong role in enabling food traceability throughout the whole food chain addressing food safety, fraud prevention, compliance with certifications and regulations, etc.

At the heart of this digitally-enabled revolution in the agri-food sector it is the data, which comes from multiple sources: remote sensing platforms, weather forecasting services, raw material market prices and especially from the Internet of Things (IoT) gathering data directly from the field and the farm through sensing devices and connected machines (tractors, their implements, and smaller agri-robots). This new paradigm paves the way also to new data-driven business models for agriculture and kickstarts the interest in data sharing mechanisms that can fully exploit the value of data for the benefit of the agri-food sector.

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