On the 29th of January, SmartAgriHubs and Internet of Food and Farm 2020 organised a high-level event in the European Parliament named ‘Smart Farming: Digitalisation of Agriculture and Vision for the CAP’.

The ECR MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen welcomed everyone wholeheartedly, before introducing the panellists of the first session on EU Agriculture and the role of digitalisation in the EU agricultural and food challenges. In his address, Mr. Ruissen introduced the attendees not only to the subject, but situated it as well, in the potential for the renewed CAP, the European Green Deal, and the Farm-to-Fork strategy. With this strategy, the EU aims to create a food-and-farm chain that is more transparent, sustainable, and competitive. Joel Bacquet, programme officer at DG CNECT, highlighted the importance of the need farmers have or will have, of Decision Support Systems, in order to help them in their decisions. He mentioned the importance of proactive detection of crop diseases digitally. SmartAgriHubs pushes this innovation in rural areas through the Digital Innovation Hubs. This is an important role for Public Policy, he posed. Edwin Hecker broke the conversation wider than the running projects, or the farmer’s viewpoint, linking the environmental, social and technological developments of the projects to the Sustainable Development Goals, and stating the smart farming and IoT can be detrimental in reaching these goals. The discussion went quite a bit further still, than just the direct influence on farming as Eduardo Cuoco stated: ‘how do we make sure that digitalisation does not leave anyone behind?’, combining the challenges of agricultural output with the challenges of keeping agriculture competitive enough for both large, and spall players to be able to compete

The second session of the morning discussed the role of data management and how to enhance the adoption of smart farming technologies. Chaired by Petros Kokkalis MEP, the discussion again, went further than the projects, which was very interesting to see develop indeed. Touching upon the role of data trust, traceability of data, and the pressing issue of lack of access to technology and connectivity in rural areas, the panel gave a varied view on the current struggles. CEMA Technical Director Ivo Hostens shared the industry’s views on the role of data management, stating that the industry is working on easy, secured brand independent data sharing by developing an open-source interface. Embedding a code of conduct on this data sharing, was agreed by the panellists a next step in the development of the digital economy in agriculture. Daniel Azevedo, director of Commodities, Trade, and Technology at Copa Cogeca, saw a challenge in the growing pressure on the productivity of farmers without the access to technology that would help them. Technology could also, said Azevedo, help farmers to know what exactly it is the consumer wants, as well as showcase the farmers themselves, allowing for full transparency in the farm-to-fork supply chain, which would change consumer behaviour.

The third session used the time well, however, in its riveting discussion on the long-term vision for EU agriculture, CAP reform and the place for smart farming. In that topic, the discussion mainly situated itself around the question of how EU citizens will benefit from these developments. Norbert Lins, MEP and chairman of the committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, lent us his chairing skills for this session. George Beers was the first voice to be heard. He is the project coordinator of both SmartAgriHubs, and IoF2020. He talked about the uncertainties surrounding digitalisation and the profound changes they are to bring with them. This, argued Beers, is to be the case for all sectors, not just agriculture. The new amounts of data to come from these developments in this new economy, should foster the development of new competences to interpret them. Beers also touched upon a sore point, often swept under the rug in these debates, which was the sheer gender imbalance, with Doris Marquadt, programme officer at the European Commission, being the only woman on stage during all three sessions. Beers said: ‘We need to address things like gender, we are missing opportunities if we do not address these issues.’. Proof of this statement was shown by Marquadt herself in her identifying of the need for aligned technological and political developments. ‘It is important that the various policy instruments go hand in hand with the digital transformation’, thus stated Marquadt. She went on to discuss the role of digitalisation in both the new Common Agricultural Policy, and the potential alignment with the European Green Deal.

The event came to a close around noon, with the closing remarks of Bert-Jan Ruissen: ‘Smart farming is high on the EU agenda, and the European Parliament is ready to further implement these developments’.

What are the main features of the ‘IoT Catalogue’ ?

The ‘IoT Catalogue’ is an online explorer of innovations in IoT applications and technologies. It enables to learn about a wide set of IoT use-cases and their validations. To facilitate searching for the most relevant results, the catalogue includes a detailed characterisation with respect to value propositions, ICT problems, functions, targets, domains, etc., but also to pick & chooses IoT technologies ranging from complete end-to-end solutions to tools or components/parts.

How does it relate to the Smart Farming and Food Security domain ?

Smart Farming and Food Security is a main application domain supported by the ‘IoT Catalogue’. Presently, several use cases (and its technologies) are included in the tool that have been facilitated by the IoF2020 project (www.iof2020.eu) covering the arable, dairy, fruit, vegetables and meat sectors. The ‘IoT Catalogue’ has been an essential tool for synergies’ analyses and for promoting reusability of technologies across different use cases, sectors or even domains; but also a key instrument to outreach the results (e.g. pilots, technologies, etc.) of the project.

How does the ‘IoT Catalogue’ connect with SmartAgriHubs?

The ‘IoT Catalogue’ is part of the ‘Iberian Irrigation Portal’ Flagship Innovation Experiment (FIE22), which is developing an online portal for assisting Iberian farmers to perform an optimal management of irrigation from a technical, economic and environmental point of view. The ‘IoT Catalogue’ is being used to create a competences’ catalogue with experts on Irrigated Agriculture digitisation and to showcase validated solutions/technologies (IoT devices, IoT platforms, software algorithms, etc.) for the irrigated agriculture domain.

Social space for smart farming

The purpose of AgriHub is to design and develop an intelligent agricultural innovation center – the digital innovation hub. The platform is designed to create links between people, companies, researchers and other entities with the knowledge and technology that will help realize innovative projects and ideas. 
 
One of the principles is to connect common users with developers and researchers - creating a community portal. The second principle is the integration of demo applications where users, developers and researchers will have the opportunity to collaborate, build and test different solutions. For this purpose, a development and testing environment is prepared. Such created experiments will be presented to other users. 
 
We are currently preparing and installing our Digital Innovation Hub solution for two new partners.  
The first one is the Polirural Digital Innovation Hub which will provide four distinctive sections, or spaces, that cater for both internal and external users. These sections include an interaction space with forums, dialogue and Wiki capabilities to support stakeholder interaction. Second, it provides a learning space for Massive Open Online Courses to facilitate dissemination and uptake of knowledge and methodology developed through the project. Next to that, it includes an experimentation space for testing analytics and visualization including text mining and system dynamics based on real data. It also provides a development and hosting space for creating virtual instances of the shared reference to be used by each pilot when developing their applications. 
 
Our second solution is the Smart Afri Hub Digital Innovation Hub which will be the main Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for interactive knowledge sharing and will host all results generated by the project. The Innovation Hub will act as a gateway for activities, creating innovative tools aimed at making rural areas and professions more attractive. 
 
We have already prepared a series of webinars for both Digital Innovation Hubs where the smartagrihub.eu project is also promoted.