PILOT : CAP SUPPORT (GREECE)

The main scope of this pilot is to evaluate a set of EO-based services designed appropriately to support key business processes and need of the CAP value chain stakeholders. The pilot activities will focus on two (2) open crop types (dry beans and peaches) and will be held in the Northern part of Greece. The services to be tested will rely on innovative tools and technologies, that will sustain the interconnection with IoT infrastructures and EO platforms, the collection and ingestion of spatiotemporal data, the multidimensional deep data exploration and modelling and the provision of meaningful insights, thus, supporting the simplification and improving the effectiveness of CAP. NP and GAIA Epicheirein will support the activities of this pilot demonstration.

The overall objective of the pilot is to validate a set of EO value-added products and services designed appropriately to support key business processes and the needs of CAP value chain stakeholders. The methodology of the pilot activities involves the integration of high power computing, machine learning methods, geospatial data analytics with data coming from EO platforms and will allow for integration with IoT based data streams and services. The convergence of high computing power, machine learning, and satellite imagery is “a perfect storm that’s just beginning to peak” and as such the ambition of the current pilot is to exploit the “produced power” for dealing effectively with CAP demands for agricultural crop type dentification, parcel monitoring, collaboration, transparency and analytics. This way the value chain stakeholders (GAIA Epicheirein, farmers, farming cooperations, etc.) will benefit from the EO data, supporting the simplification and improving the effectiveness of CAP.

NP has already started collecting field-sensing data through its network of telemetric IoT stations, called GAIAtrons. GAIAtrons offer configurable data collection and transmission rates. Since 01/03/2016 over 1M samples have been collected and stored to NP’s cloud infrastructure that refer to atmospheric and soil measurements from various agricultural areas of Greece. Moreover, within the same cloud infrastructure (GAIA cloud), remote sensing data from the new Sentinel 2 optical products are being extracted and stored since the beginning of 2016. This comprises both raw and processed (corrected products, extracted indices) data represented in raster formats that are being handled and distributed using optimal big data management methodologies.

The pilot activities aim at providing EO-based products and services designed to support key business processes and needs of the CAP value chain stakeholders, including:

• The farmer decision-making actions during the submission of aid application. More specifically, for each agricultural parcel, the developed services will allow the a) automated validation of the declared crop, b) accurate definition of the eligibility area, c) monitoring of the good agricultural and environmental conditions. Each year the Farmer, the beneficiary, must provide evidence to document his/her eligibility. His/her choices during the one-off submission process have great financing impact and may lead to losses or, even worse, trigger penalties. The offered services will boost the farmer’s decision-making power [REF-16] and help them maximize the benefits and minimize the financial risks in relation to the agricultural land for which direct support is requested.

• The Farmer transition towards Smart Farming, i.e. the provision of tools that support not only the compliance with CAP but also assist the adoption and implementation of Smart Farming practices. The proposed services for agricultural and environmental monitoring at parcel level, provide streams of data and facts that can be used for automated irrigation, crop protection, actual crop status and crop variability identification.

The main motivation for this pilot is:

• To demonstrate the added-value of EO-based products and services designed appropriately to support key business processes and the needs of CAP value chain stakeholders.

• To raise the awareness of the farmers, agronomists, agricultural advisors, farmer cooperatives and organizations (e.g. group of producers) on how new technological tools could facilitate the crop declaration process.

• To increase the technological capacity of the involved partners through a set of pilot activities that involves management of big data for high value crops.

The main KPIs of the pilot are:

• %Decrease in false crop type declarations following the supporting services vs what would be expected based on historical data (information correctness measured as inconsistencies ratio).

• %Accuracy in crop type identification.