Innovative interconnected farm management App and software for precision farming

Project Information

Agroptima FM

Grant agreement ID: 744916

DOI

10.3030/744916

Project closed

EC signature date 17 November 2016

Start date 1 December 2016

End date 31 March 2017

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine, maritime and inland water research, and the bioeconomy

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

AGROPTIMA SL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Agroptima FM (Innovative interconnected farm management App and software for precision farming)

Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2017-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

For farmers, data recording, keeping, and analysis are tasks of a relatively high effort when done manually. Currently there are no comprehensive solutions on the market that would offer automation of these tasks. This creates inefficiency and results in farmer’s double effort (copying data into spreadsheets). Farmers often go with their gut feeling when planning their activities and their decision making is not based on hard data. This results in lesser outcomes obtained in terms of productivity and outputs.
Agroptima Farm Manager is a software consisting of a mobile app, web app, and cloud service, which supports farmers in making informed decisions and performing precision farming. This is achieved through easy collection of relevant performance data, such as aggregated crops performance, effort put into achieving results (sowing, fertilising, tilling, etc., machinery used, among others. The data is obtained not only from records kept by the farmers but also gathered by the agricultural machinery on the farm. Through the features of the software, Agroptima Farm Manager delivers greater results: increased efficiency and higher productivity. Agroptima Farm Manager allows farmers to collect and record data on a handheld device also offline while in the field and the data collected through the agricultural machinery is fed into the software automatically.
During he project we have undertaken a full feasibility study of our farm management software platform and investigated the strategy needed to be implemented for its commercialization and adoption on the market, including investigation of technical and business steps to be taken.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During Phase 1 feasibility assessment, we have conducted a detailed analysis of the business and technical feasibility of developing and launching Agroptima FM on the market. We were able to establish that in order to provide an attractive offering to the target customers, we will need to not only expand our current product to include the automatic data collection and analysis, but also it will have to be a fully ready plug-and-play package. The business sustainability has been demonstrated by the detailed financial analysis (5-year projections). Considering the results of the feasibility study, we have decided that it is worthy to go through with the implementation of the project and commercialisation plan. Therefore, we will need access to funding, which we intend to raise through the SME Instrument Phase 2 grant as well as by looking for further opportunities among private investors such as venture capitalists and business angels in the future.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

As interconnected farm solutions which offer farm management and productivity analysis in an automatic and digitised way don't exist on the market at the moment, our solution will be the first entrant.
The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN (FAO) predicts that the global population will reach 8 billion people by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050. In order to keep up with the growing food consumption, food production must increase by 70% by 2050. Through more effective and efficient farming tools, such as interconnected software technology provided by Agroptima, rural communities’ capacities for producing and delivering agricultural services and products are strengthened. Precision farming is a practice resulting in increased productivity and resource efficiency (such as water, land, soil, nutrients, etc.). The innovative solution that the precision farming tool Agroptima is offering with their software which supports informed decision-making in agriculture, leads to low waste economy. This specifically supports the European Union’s specific programme Horizon 2020 societal challenge 2: ‘Food Security, Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry, Marine, Maritime and Inland Water Research, and the Bioeconomy’ as well as the Common Agricultural Policy.

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