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Aggregate Farming in the Cloud

Project description

Enabling farmers with agriculture intelligent systems

The economic viability of agriculture in Europe is at risk. Farmers are challenged by high costs, low yields, labour shortages, climate change, plant pathogens and livestock disease. That’s a lot to manage, especially for small agricultural enterprises. To address this, the EU-funded AFarCloud project will develop a distributed platform for autonomous farming that enables the integration of agriculture intelligent systems in real time. This will enhance productivity, food quality, crop and livestock health, and reduce labour costs. The platform will be integrated with farm management software to support monitoring and decision-making solutions. AFarCloud also aims to provide more farmers with access to farming robots by establishing a cooperative network of farming vehicles.

Objective

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness, as well as an increasing labour shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas. Furthermore, reliable detection, accurate identification and proper quantification of pathogens and other factors affecting both plant and animal health, are critical to be kept under control in order to reduce economic expenditures, trade disruptions and even human health risks.
AFarCloud will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real time data mining techniques.
The AFarCloud project also aims to make farming robots accessible to more users by enabling farming vehicles to work in a cooperative mesh, thus opening up new applications and ensuring re-usability, as heterogeneous standard vehicles can combine their capabilities in order to lift farmer revenue and reduce labour costs.
The achievements from AFarCloud will be demonstrated in 3 holistic demonstrators (Finland, Spain and Italy), including cropping and livestock management scenarios and 8 local demonstrators (Latvia, Sweden, Spain and Czech Republic) in order to test specific functionalities and validate project results in relevant environments located in different European regions.
AFarCloud outcomes will strengthen partners’ market position boosting their innovation capacity and addressing industrial needs both at EU and international levels. The consortium represents the whole ICT-based farming solutions’ value chain, including all key actors needed for the development, demonstration and future market uptake of the precision farming framework targeted in the project.

Coordinator

UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID
Net EU contribution
€ 240 625,00
Address
CALLE RAMIRO DE MAEZTU 7 EDIFICIO RECTORADO
28040 Madrid
Spain

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Region
Comunidad de Madrid Comunidad de Madrid Madrid
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 687 500,00

Participants (60)