An Innovative Integrated Field Sensor system providing a precise farming tool to reduce production costs and water wastage.

Project Information

Stoock

Grant agreement ID: 808146

DOI

10.3030/808146

Project closed

EC signature date 5 March 2018

Start date 1 January 2018

End date 30 April 2018

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

EAGROOP LDA
Portugal

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Stoock (An Innovative Integrated Field Sensor system providing a precise farming tool to reduce productioncosts and water wastage.)

Reporting period: 2018-01-01 to 2018-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

"What is the problem/issue being addressed?
Recording, storage and analysis of data farming are essential to ensure high crop productivity. However, the activity carried out manually by farmers can cause errors in addition to waste of time. This problem has also consequences on the waste of the resources needed to ensure optimal results and on increased production costs.

Why is it important for society?
Stoock allows farmers to collect and process several physical parameters on a handheld device, to improve productivity and reduce production costs. By better monitoring crops, Stoock allows farmers to understand the real needs of the crops, not only to avoid water wastage but also to grow healthier crops. It also allows to consult a cloud database by creating correlations between the production factors gathered within many different geographical areas with weather and soil parameters detected by Stoock.

What are the overall objectives?
Objective#1: Finalise engineering of Stoock (device autonomy and full integration with Agroop cooperation)

Objective#2: Conduct large-scale, international, pilot study. This aims at demonstrating the scalability of the solution and how the crowdsourcing of Big Data from Stoock sensors can feed more advanced models to predict soil and climate variables.
Objective#3: Scale-up device manufacturing. Establish European value chain, including a contract manufacturer able to deliver at least 1000 devices to reach commercialisation.
Objective#4: Achieve CE marking and outline a strategy to define the regulatory framework for each target market.

Objective#5: Define and implement a sound IP strategy; execution of EU-Wide marketing and communications strategy.
"

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

Definition of the MVP, product development plan, industrialisation plan including budgeting with potential subcontractors.
Interviews and discussions with potential customers, users, review and update of the business model and commercialisation plan, review of the financial projections

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)

Precision farming is the answer to the need to increase efficiency while simultaneously tackling the problems of pollution and sustainability within agriculture. This technique focuses on utilising resources optimally to improve the quality and quantity of crops while lowering the cost of production. An important aspect of precision farming is that it utilises water optimally and raises productivity. As water supplies are often a limited but required input, a farmer’s goal should be to maximize net income per unit water used rather than per land unit - maximizing crop water productivity is consistent with maximizing crop yield per unit of land area. Innovative irrigation practices can enhance water efficiency, gaining an economic advantage while also reducing environmental burdens. Effective, well-timed irrigation is critical for sustainable and profitable production with high yields, good harvest quality and optimum fertiliser efficacy. The most fundamental requirement of scheduling irrigation is the determination of crop evapotranspiration.
Agroop proposes a low cost, turnkey sensor that gathers the key parameters to measure evapotranspiration and combines with our integrative farm management software (Agroop Cooperation) to improve the productivity of a farm.
It is a self-configurable, solar-powered, multi-sensor device in a stick-like shape. Once planted in the soil, it gathers critical physical parameters such as air temperature, soil moisture, air humidity, soil temperature, solar radiation, wind speed and rainfall.

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