This week, the IoF2020 project celebrates its first anniversary in Almería, Spain. We are getting ready to reap the first fruits towards the large-scale implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the European farming and food sector.
Much of previous efforts culminate in our event gathering more than 200 stakeholders from the agri-food value chain, including farmers, technology providers, high-level policy-makers and renowned academics. Besides creating synergies between those stakeholders and informing about the status quo and the future of digital agriculture in Europe, the event will provide the opportunity to shape the €5 million IoF2020 Open Call. The latter will be launched in the second half of 2018 and is supposed to further push the boundaries of technologies applied to agriculture. The open call is organized as a workshop and gives new partners the possibility to join our consortium in order to help to identify additional areas for application and develop new regions to increase the impact of the project. Since knowledge exchange is an important aspect of our use-cases, we are fervently looking forward to the participants’ ideas and contributions to bring IoF2020 to the next level. You can follow all activities via our livestream.
To achieve our objective to strengthen the agri-food sector’s environmental sustainability, product quality, efficiency and transparency, IoF2020 implements 19 use-cases across 5 thematic trials: arable crop, dairy, meat, vegetables and fruits. The first results and some challenges those use-cases had to overcome are going to be presented throughout the stakeholder event.
The event will also give the opportunity to experience the applied technologies first-hand by showcasing ICT-solutions in one of our use-cases: The tomato greenhouses.
Upon illustrating the achievements of the first year, sensors have been installed in fields to help farmers manage their crops with greater precision, and knowledge gathered from soy cultivation is transferred into other agronomic fields, such as potato farming. Decision support tools strongly rely on farmers’ inputs to develop an efficient system in connection to current farming practices, which will be among the many objectives for the current year.
As we are about to expand the IoF2020 family through the open call, developing the ecosystem around the project has been one of our key focuses to knit together a complementary community of partners ranging from farmers and technology providers to researchers, local to EU policymakers, and interest organisations. At present the IoF2020 consortium represents more than 70 partners from 14 EU countries. Since each contribution is equally important in establishing a vital ecosystem, we hereby would like to take this opportunity to cordially thank all our contributors, partners, stakeholders, supporters, followers, and readers alike. We are looking forward to experiencing the potential of future technologies unfold in all aspects of our lives and remain with the determination to further improve the agri-food sector in the years to come.
