SmartAgriHubs partner Innovation for Agriculture (IfA), recently celebrated International Day of Rural Women 2020. Taking place annually on the 15th October, the day aims to commemorate the work of women in agriculture across the globe.  

In terms of gender, IfA is unusual for an agricultural organisation and Knowledge exchange Innovation Hub. 60% of the employees are women and of those women 40% are active farmers alongside their work for IfA.  

Manager of IfA communications, Martha Hayes, said “When compared to most industries, agriculture has traditionally been very male dominated. We therefore wanted to use the international day of rural women to showcase our brilliant team of women farmers, demonstrating that times are evolving, and women are as much at the forefront of British agriculture as men. 

Nowadays I would say, the biggest barrier to change is showing women that those opportunities are there for them, regardless of their gender. Agriculture has become a very encouraging place for women.” 

IfA believes that the next crucial step is to combat racial discrimination in the industry. The organisation will be exploring ways that they can encourage BAME groups into UK agriculture, whilst also targeting the barriers which prevent a more diverse agricultural industry currently.  

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.