Project description
Bolstering the precision farming
The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) aims to support a resilient, sustainable and competitive agriculture. However, a growing population and climate change are making it harder to ensure sustainable food production and rural development. This requires farmers today to apply some rather costly and time-consuming methods. Precision agriculture software tools could ease farmers to track, manage and maximise crop yields and revenues and preserve resources. In this context, the EU-funded Ceres project will develop a control tool for software precision farming designed especially for technicians by the eFoodPrint’s company. It will incorporate a sustainability dimension to tackle urgent agricultural challenges while reducing the costs and time of advanced technical services and limiting CAP expenses up to 40 %.
Objective
To ensure enough food production and limit its environmental impact, EU invests half of its total budget in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Yet, farmers struggle to comply with legislation and implement sustainable and cost-efficient production models and seek advice from technical experts. Technicians must therefore monitor the farms and analyse complex systems, which is time-consuming and challenging. Software Precision farming has recently emerged as a tool which enables to monitor, analyse and optimise agricultural production and perfectly fits with technician needs. Nowadays, however, farm management options target producers offering a service to substitute technicians. This strategy obviates that technicians are high skilled professionals conscious of both the forthcoming agricultural endeavours and the potential of management software to tackle them. Thus, it is through them that eventually producers would get involved in precision farming. Through Ceres we aim at developing a software precision farming management tool designed for technicians which integrates a sustainability dimension to tackle agricultural challenges. Ceres is a software designed specifically for technicians to manage several farms and a wide range of factors influencing the supply chain. Ceres is a software designed specifically for technicians to manage all the factors involved in managing several farms, reducing expenditure in fertilization (up to 70%), water consumption (up to 30%) and phytosanitary products (30%) as well as delivering sustainability indexes, traceability and prediction tools. It will enable technicians to save up to 40% of their own time investment, being able to lower their cost services up to 35% and reach new clients (use of Ceres could reduce CAP expenses in 40%). eFoodPrint’s broad experience in the agro-food software enabled us to satisfied producers’ demands and raised their competitiveness. We forecasted a R.O.I of 5.5 with a pay-back period of 40 month
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencescomputer securitycryptography
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
25165 JUNCOSA - (LLEIDA)
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.