PILOT : CEREALS AND BIOMASS CROPS_3

The pilot was designed to offer precision farming services consisting in different crop monitoring and management technologies specifically geared to biomass crops with particular interest in sorghum, fiber hemp and cardoon. Offered smart farming services include:

• Biomass crop (sorghum/hemp/cardoon) monitoring using remote sensor and realtime streaming sensor network big data
• Crop growth and yield modelling
• Early warning: yield and quality deviation, threatening events (biotic/abiotic stress, threshold alerts) for crop growth and development
• Visualization: processed data and model results are published in an intuitive way and viewable on the computer, smartphone or tablet
• GPRS connectivity
• Cloud based crop management infrastructure
• Web portal cloud solution.

The pilot secured adhesion of fifteen farmers and/or farming cooperatives with more than 120 ha. The pilot will run intensive extension services to promote the adoption of the new technologies (remote sensing, IoT). CREA will work on sorghum and fiber hemp, while Novamont will work on cardoon. VITO will support remote sensing technologies, while CREA will support proximal streaming sensor network data technologies.

The main motivations for this pilot are:

• Identifying the potential for using satellite data and machine learning for biomass crop monitoring and the development of yield models.

• Evaluating the comparative importance between the use of proximal wireless sensor network data and satellite data in biomass farm telemetry.

Three relevant KPIs have been identified so far, namely:

• %Increase in farm productivity following the advisory irrigation, fertilization, pest/ disease management services vs what would be the revenue following standard farming practices based on historical data: Quantify %increase in farm productivity for all three crop types.

• %Decrease in operational costs for performing the same farming activities (through better management of resources) following the advisory irrigation, fertilization, pest/disease management services vs what would be the revenue following standard farming practices based on historical data: Quantify %Decrease in operational costs for all three crop types.

• %Decrease in fresh water and fertilizer usage following the aforementioned advisory services.