The European agricultural sector is in crisis. The number of people employed in the agriculture sector went from 30M to 22.2M between 2005-2016, the number of farmers from 12.2M in 2010 to 10.8M in 2016 and by 2020 there will be less than 10M farmers. Moreover, the agriculture industry output in Members States has also decreased from 2016-2017 and this reflects in the capital expenditure reduction. The reasons for the crisis are due to the high costs for inefficient operating activities, thus leading to low margins for the sector.
The following issues are present in the agricultural scenario:
i) High water consumption and increasing water price where agriculture consumes 44% of fresh water in the EU and the volume of water used for irrigation is 39.8 Bm3/year in EU-28, with a total cost of over 20 B€/year for the agriculture sector,
ii) Expensive and inefficient irrigation systems that forces farmers to be on the fields 3-4 times per week, and the lack of water irrigation technologies leads up to losses of 1,500 out of 2,500 trillion litres of water in agriculture, and
iii) High costs of pesticides and fertilizers:excessive usage of fertilizers and pesticides leads to an enhanced risk of the soil quality and associated problems with water quality. Farmers ignore the real status of soil at root-level. Therefore, they use non-optimized fertilizers, introducing further inefficiency.
Revotree is the only agronomic Internet of Things (IoT) automated intelligent irrigation platform that lets farmers know crops’ real needs, able to take autonomous decisions via its algorithms to control the opening and closure of the water flow and indicates the correct usage of pesticides and fertilizers needed without any user interaction, thereby improving crops’ productivity and natural resource usage. Revotree allows farmers to improve their business by saving money on water consumption, improving crop productivity, and decreasing the use of pesticides and fertilizers.
