Digital farmers: artificial intelligence takes “the field”

With the advent of social media and digital storytelling, agriculture, too, has gone digital in recent years. Many are the videos and influencers that are making a splash on the web and telling about the lives of those who have chosen to dedicate themselves to the land, plants and nature and are well aware of the challenges farmers face in a world whose ecosystem is changing substantially: climate change, large amounts of rain that fall on crops destroying them followed by long months of drought, but also the reduction of glaciers and the ever decreasing availability of primary resources are just some of the problems contemporary farmers face.
This is what Fabio Antonelli, head of the OpenIoT research unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and Matteo Fiocco (aka “Matt the Farmer”), a content creator from Brescia who is active on social media and Youtube mainly on the topic of agriculture, talked about in the “Digital Farmers” talk at Wired Next Fest.

Antonelli spoke about the importance of data and how it is collected and shared to increase productivity, optimize processes and ensure a more sustainable use of resources in agriculture by leveraging artificial intelligence algorithms and robotics solutions.

When we think of IoT we think of the fridge that does our shopping offered moderator Riccardo Saporiti as a cue, but in agriculture? “Agriculture is one of the latest areas affected by the internet of things, and sensors today applied in the field allow us to have accurate knowledge in the field,” FBK’s Fabio Antonelli commented, ”so that we can apply precision agriculture approaches and techniques, which allow us to decide on inputs in an accurate manner, saving resources and helping crop sustainability.  So thanks to this new approach, to the integration of IoT in agriculture, we can be more sustainable in the use of resources primarily water and limit the use of pesticides. Now the challenge is to make these technologies market-ready in a sustainable way.” 

Antonelli went on to mention how the IoT can also be a tool to mitigate the consequences of climate change: “Today, the large amount of data available makes it possible to better study solutions: there are platforms and systems available for research to carry out studies and foster policies. Bringing data and experts together allows for better solutions: water is one of the first issues, but this also affects many other resources.”

Antonelli then recounted the European project AgrifoodTEF, coordinated by Fondazione Bruno Kessler and partnering with 30 partners from nine European nations to create a network of infrastructures to test and validate artificial intelligence and robotics solutions in agrifood. The ambitious ultimate goals of the project are to optimize robotics for sustainable agricultural practices and reduced chemical use, to use artificial intelligence to improve product yield and quality, and to monitor crops but also to interpret data to evaluate and validate innovative solutions to better meet the needs of farms.

Managing dataspaces is also the focus of the AgriDataSpace project: dataspaces are a secure and standardized digital infrastructure where participants can securely share and use data and services to prevent risks in agriculture and pool the knowledge gained.

Speaking specifically of water resources and the importance of their preservation, Fondazione Bruno Kessler has developed, with the support of the Autonomous Province of Trento and with the partnership with Fondazione Edmund Mach and Trentino Digitale S.p.a., a local information system to promote and encourage efficient management of irrigation resources through precision irrigation practices. The IRRITRE project is based on a set of Agriculture 4.0 technologies combined through the use of artificial intelligence in order to provide monitoring and control capabilities, promoting the development of predictive models and planning tools on a province-wide scale for optimizing the use of the irrigation resource and its impact on crops.