European farmers are in need of yield production increasing and climate change adapting plant growth strategies to optimally supply plants achieving highest food quality and stabilizing plant growth. This can be enabled through a holistic farming management approach for variable rate applications, also known as Precision Farming (PF). Despite the progress achieved so far with a 10% market share of agronomic PF tools, a continuous growth is being hampered by the vast mass of data to evaluate and interpret by farmers, generated by different and not compatible sources. Moreover, farmers hesitated to invest in PF tools due to high investment costs, unclear economic benefits as well as higher efforts in farm management. Farmers are looking for an easy handling, time-saving and cost-efficient integral solution. So there is an excellent business opportunity for agricon to provide with AgriCloud an integrated, compatible and automatically working PF management system to boost food production in a resource-efficient and sustainable way.
The objectives were to prepare the AgriCloud market introduction thoroughly by identifying special concerns, risks, and IP issues and transforming this knowledge into a reliable and sustainable business approach. The project-specific objectives were:
• To realise customer surveys to analyse their special concerns and constraints w.r.t. PF and identify pilot customers for the first trials in target countries (Germany, Poland, Baltic States)
• To elaborate the business plan with more concrete market figures in the target countries and develop different commercialisation scenarios
• To set up a risk management plan and IP strategy
• To collect and present trusted data about PF benefits depending on farm size and crop type to increase market acceptance
