Irrigation is one of the most crucial tasks in crop agriculture. It is also a very complicated one. The farming communities in Portugal and Spain cultivate many different crops, on various types of soil, in different climate conditions and using diverse irrigation infrastructure. And actually, the management of those communities’ water needs requires an integration of technologies that allows farmers to bolster their activities on three fronts: agronomical, economic and environmental. How is that you may ask? Well, the Online Irrigation Portal allows the farmer to optimise water consumption and rationalise costs and fosters a better relationship between service provider and farmers.

Among the higher costs of agricultural management you can find the costs of irrigation, which are not exclusively water costs, but also energy costs related to irrigation activities. Furthermore, efficient water management is becoming ever more important for the environment. Therefore, a good management for the optimal consumption of such a finite resource is desirable. The online irrigation portal we develop makes this possible. How? Irrigation communities have data on their farms and crops such as water consumption, water costs, soil types and crop varieties. This data is gathered and implemented. Furthermore, by using IoT sensors and probes as well as weather forecasting, the online irrigation portal also captures data on agronomic conditions such as soil moisture, temperature, humidity, etc. Once all these data are combined in irrigation models, we have a digital-based service informing farmers and supporting irrigation activities.

The SmartAgriHubs framework in which we work has helped us out a lot. Our Digital Innovation Hub supports the coordination activities among all the partners and provides synergies. Also, our DIH recommended several actions for us to improve the potential results of the experiment (IoT-wise).

In the first 7 months of the FIE, our team was working on ironing out the foundation our journey’s success depends: planning and experiment preparatory activities, physical meetings with farmers’ communities, billing methodologies, IoT tool set-up, and so on. We also saw many coordination meetings to make sure that each member of the team had a clear definition of their tasks. Today, the team is developing the irrigation portal, so our IT developers are working very hard! 

European consumers and food manufacturers face food supply chain that are often opaque and non-transparent. In fact, given the complexity of supply chain, 32% of manufacturers are unable to guarantee that the ingredients they use are not fraudulent. As a result, in many instances both consumers and food manufacturers are left in the dark. Ironically, the data is kept in silos at every point on the supply chains. The problem however is that there are no incentives to share this data beyond the EU legal requirement of “1 step back, 1 step forward”. So, when a problem is discovered along the supply chain, it is hard to pinpoint specifically the location where the problem originated, thereby making recalls costly and wasteful... 

Therefore, we want to bridge this gap in data by developing a web application that can connect data from across the supply chain. For our product, we are implementing blockchain technology (through the OriginTrail protocol) to integrate data from stakeholders across the dairy and poultry supply chains to improve the traceability of products. When a problem such as contamination is discovered, suppliers cannot retroactively change the data in the system to cover it up, since the OriginTrail protocol enables a quick discovery of any data discrepancies. What’s more: having all the data interconnected and accessible makes it easier to narrow down on the source of the problem which drives down the costs of a recall and prevents food waste. Of course, we are aware of the risks attached to gathering and centralising so much data. To deal with this, the data is kept on a decentralised network so that no central authority can take unfair advantage of the aggregated data. 

We are currently well under way to achieve our goal. At the moment, most of our work is focused on software development and user interface design. We are also already conducting customer research and are actively looking into food producers’ and their customers’ needs. Especially at this stage, the advantages of being part of the SmartAgriHubs network become very clear. For example, BioSense, our Digital Innovation Hub, supports the FIE by creating a panel of users (farmers, food producers, consumers) from the poultry and dairy sectors that will test the solution. Moreover, they also provide consultation and support on the business models required to engage all relevant actors in a strategic way.  

In the end, our combined efforts will translate into a user-friendly web application, also accessible by mobile devices with a QR code, available to dairy and poultry food producers. They in turn can make the application available to end-users to showcase their transparency and the high quality of their product (GMO-free, premium breeding). All in all, the quality of the food on our tables improves! 

“Alert: ‘your wheat is thirsty!’ The farmer opens his web app to look for more information. He sees that hardly any rain has fallen on his wheat fields and no rain is expected for the coming days. The graphs on his screen show him that his wheat crops are running out of water. He decides to intervene and irrigate his fields.” 

If it was up to us, this is how the future of wheat farming looks like! At Digi-PILOTE we develop an online Decision Support System that helps wheat farmers deal with their daily problems, in particular with those problems related to nitrogen supply and irrigation.  

The window to apply nitrogen or water in the right place at the right time is very small. This makes it difficult for farmers to decide whether or not to intervene. In addition, because of the changing climate giving way to unpredictable weather patterns, this process is only getting harder. Therefore, the precise monitoring of wheat crops throughout the year provided by the Digi-PILOTE app offers a solution to farmers. 

 The app combines data from IoT sensors on the field and satellite imagery with analysis models to generate advice. This data is translated into user-friendly information on the app, and when anomalies are detected, the farmer will automatically receive an alert from the app. Moreover, an information system enables a connection between farmers’ plot management software and other operators’ (cooperatives, software vendors) decisions support systems.  

Being part of SmartAgriHubs has allowed us to have testbeds! The project also opened a door for us to work with a Digital Innovation Hub called Digifermes. This network consists of 13 farms that serve as laboratories for research and tools like Digi-PILOTE. As a result, our solution is being tested on wheat fields in the South East of France. With the help of the hub we can continue to improve the application to make it as user-friendly as possible.  In total, 50 to 100 farmers, 10 to 50 advisors and 300 field experiments are involved to make Digi-Pilote a success!