Digitalizing Specialty Crop Farming
Cyber-physical and embedded systems (CPES) are currently revolutionizing many areas of our life, be it in eHealth, Smart Grid, Smart Cities, or eMobility. Agriculture, however, is a domain with relatively slow adoption due to a lack of quality broadband, cost of initial investment, long payback times, lack of trust that CPES deliver on their promises, non-intuitive designs, as well as lack of access to independent advice, support, and training.
Nevertheless, the benefits of CPES in agriculture can be plentiful, and the innovation application experimentation (IAE) agroCPS, brings together FEDE, with over 50 years of experience in agricultural machinery production and the ICT company HISPATEC to demonstrate these.
| Partner | Role | Expertise |
|---|---|---|
| FEDE | Hardware and technology provider | Pulverizadores Fede is exclusively dedicated to the development design and manufacture of air blast sprayer and trailed mist blower, with equipment for the protection of special crops, which makes the company specialist in the sector at an international level. |
| DIHA | DIH | The DIH Andalucía Agrotech is a centre of activity to create, anticipate and channel digital innovation in the agri-food sector, that provides the best conditions to enable sector companies achieve business success in the long-term. |
| HISPATECH | Technology provider | Technology provider in the field of agri-food sector. Specialists in software and smart agro solutions for every link in the agri-food chain. |
Business case
agroCPS, with tractor installed cloud connected embedded systems (marketed as Specialty Crop Gateways (SCGs)), allows farms to cost-effectively manage filed operations.
Operations’ success is seamlessly documented and interconnected with other areas of the exploitation such as warehouse operations, sales, logistics, and accounting in HISPATEC’s holistic farm management information system (FMIS).
Farmers’ hurdles with respect to trust, independent advice, and support are overcome with the help of the Spanish Regional Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Sustainable Development of the Government of Andalusia that runs the DIH Andalucía Agrotech (DIHA), which since 2017 helps farmers to become more competitive using digital technologies. DHIA promotes living labs in public-private partnership where farmers can “test before invest”. DIHA also offers advice and guidance, and has well focused education offerings to enable the digital green transformation of agriculture.
