Problem:

Traditional farming practices often overuse inputs, such as herbicides, treating with a global treatment approach. This results in higher environmental impact and increased costs for farmers. Advanced resource-efficient methods such as spot spraying technology, are on the market, but they are not yet widely used by small and medium-sized farms.

Solution:

A multi-criteria evaluation framework calculates a wide range of indicators to provide an assessment of new resource-efficient methods like spot spraying technologies.For example, Systerre®, a web-based tool, calculates technical, economic, and environmental indicators. Spot spraying, powered by advanced AI and sensors, applies herbicides only where weeds are detected, significantly reducing inputs. 

This method will be carried out as a part of case study 8 of the Farmtopia project to assess the performance of spot spraying on maize and wheat and to provide recommendations for making the technology accessible to SMEs.

Practical Recommendations: 
Multi-criteria assessment has several advantages:

-Gathering useful information about the farm.

-Measuring post-performance of a system: it allows farmers to assess the overall impact of

their cropping system and the practices that can or may affect their farm, based on solid indicators.

-Prior assessment of evolution scenarios.

Results expected in Farmtopia case study 8: 

• Sprayer equipped with spot spraying sensors on a farm in Saint-Hilaire-en-Woëvr…

Problem: 

Mushroom production is a very technical process and represents a special case of controlled environment agriculture (CEA). The sector of specialty mushrooms is dominated by small- and medium-scale producers across Europe. Specifically, oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus spp.) are cultivated for commercial production on substrate blocks. Environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, illumination, and carbon dioxide are important drivers in mushroom growth. An efficient localization and accurate yield mapping of complex morphology agricultural products such as oyster mushrooms can help farmers to tackle variability and mitigate the labor-intensive cost associated with optimum yield and manual harvesting.

Solution: 

The Smart Mushroom Farming tool developed in Farmtopia offers an innovative, automated approach to monitoring mushroom growth. Using digital technology, it tracks pixel changes in images to generate real-time growth curves. This enables farmers to monitor yield and environmental conditions more accurately, ensuring uniform growth and reducing resource input. The tool also integrates data and generates alerts when specific metrics reach critical thresholds, allowing for timely intervention.

Practical Recommendations:

-Monitor production data: It provides recommendations for maturity stage, helping farmers track production performance and optimize harvesting schedules
-Receive alerts and insights: It notifies the farmers when environmental conditions require adjustment, helping prevent losses and ensuring optimal yield.
-Improve decision-making: Farmers can make informed decisions about climate control, harvesting, and resource management.
-Enhance efficiency: It ensures consistent mushroom growth and yield forecasting.
-Integrate with farm automation: It might be integrated into advanced machinery and robotics for agricultural task automation.

Problem:

Organic avocado farming faces significant sustainability challenges due to high production costs and increasing irrigation demands. Farmtopia partnered with 7 smallholder organic avocado farmers in Chania (GR) and the tech provider to deploy the “gaiasense” Smart Farming (SF) solution.

Solution:

The “gaiasense” system integrates multi-source data from field sensors, in-situ observations, farm calendars, and EO data to power advanced scientific models calibrated to each site’s conditions, generating tailored predictions and recommendations for optimal farming practices. 7 IoT stations were installed across the participating parcels, to address the region’s diverse microclimates and soil zones.

Iterative consultations with farmers helped define functional requirements and configure predictive models specifically for avocado cultivation. Additionally, the solution incorporated Farmtopia’s “Data Exchange” module, enabling secure and standards compliant data sharing among cooperative members.

The business model was tailored to prioritise collective service purchases through cooperatives and producer unions, enabling economies of scale. Under this scheme, the tech provider covers the costs of infrastructure and data modeling, with farmers paying only an annual service fee. Costs decrease further when agronomist services are covered by the cooperative.

Outcomes: Applying the smart farming solution to organic avocados cut fertilizer use by 74.3% and water consumption by 61.6%.

Practical Recommendations:

-Encourage farmers to consistently record cultivation practices and maintain detailed farm logs.
-Emphasize farm advisors' role in interpreting advice and guiding effective implementation.
-Promote sustainable business models based on cross-value chain collaboration, data sharing and fair benefit distribution.

Outlook:
Partner with cooperatives and food companies for local support and broad farmer reach, ensuring accessibility and cost efficiency.

• Farmtopia’s “Data Exchange” module

Problem:

Small and medium farmers face major barriers to adopting Agricultural Digital Solutions, including high costs, low interoperability with other technologies, etc. Existing business models favor large farms, limiting smaller ones benefiting and hindering sustainability efforts. 

Solution:

Through the project, it is explored how SCBM can address behavioral, technological, and financial challenges in ADS adoption. Using interviews, workshops, and surveys, key interventions and new SCBM patterns are identified. farms. Such interventions are specific for the diverse phases of the process: 

-Development phase: interventions include creating flexible applications of ADSs to suit different farm sizes, ensuring integration of ADSs with existing systems and promoting data- sharing mechanisms. User-friendliness is particularly emphasized to encourage adoption, alongside farmers’ autonomy in decision-making.

-Adoption phase: SCBM process suggests strengthening dissemination through intermediaries such as ambassador farmers, workshops, and communication campaigns in order to build trust in the technology. Other interventions include

-Consolidation phase: the SCBM process suggests considering flexible pricing options (e.g., freemium or pay-per-use), hardware and software as-a-service, or other solutions such as external partners financing ADSs to reduce the financial burden on farmers.

Benefits:

Better ADS integration; User-friendly and farmers-oriented technologies; Lower investment costs; Improved affordabilit y;Increased farmer investment capacity ;Optimized supply chains.

Practical Recommendations:

Successful SCBM implementation requires: 1. collaboration among farmers, tech providers, and supply chain actors to co-design ADSs; 2. leveraging networks like farmers’ associations and digital innovation hubs; 3. improving digital literacy through training; 4. flexible pricing and data valorization to reduce costs; and 5. policy support to incentivize small-farm ADS adoption.

Problem:
In today’s agriculture, efficiency and sustainability are more important than ever, yet the high costs, technical complexities, and lack of access to advanced equipment remain significant barriers. These challenges often limit adoption and hinder innovation, particularly for small-scale farmers who lack the resources to invest. 

Solution:

Inspired by the French CUMA model, the Farmtopia project aspires to create an Agricultural Digital Solutions Sharing Platform, fostering the replication of the CUMA model across Europe. 

Practical Recommendations:

The ADS platform will serve as a hub that empowers the sharing of a wide array of resources. It facilitates the sharing of traditional equipment: tractors, attachments, ploughs, seeders, and harvesters while also supporting cutting-edge digital technologies, like drones, GPS-guided tractors, sensors, etc. Through this feature, farmers can monetize underutilized equipment by renting it out to others, turning idle assets into a steady source of incom,e and improving overall return on investment (ROI).This approach reduces capital expenses and encourages collaboration within agricultural communities.

The platform offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for cooperatives and community organizations, enabling the creation of customized systems for managing and sharing equipment.

Additional "Knowledge Base" module - a rich library of intangible digital solutions - provides decision-support systems, crop management algorithms, tutorials, and software tools, helping farmers adopt tailored solutions to enhance productivity, reduce waste, and minimize costs.

Through its approach, the ADS platform aspires to redefine farming, transforming it into a more efficient, affordable, and sustainable endeavour. By leveraging the power of shared resources, advanced technologies, and collective expertise, the platform turns challenges into opportunities, empowering farmers to thrive in an ever-changing agricultural landscape.

• Mock-up representation of the Farmtopia ADS sharing platform

Problem:
Different agricultural digital solutions frequently are incompatible and cannot exchange datavmaking their use by farmers, advisors and cooperatives more difficult. Agricultural information, such as weather forecasts, pest data and farm records cannot be integrated, and as a result, inefficiencies increase and the potential for decision-making remains unrealized. Furthermore, the use of data-sharing tools needs to also take into consideration security and privacy issues.

Solution:

The Farmtopia Data Exchange Module provides a standardized, interoperable platform for peer-to-peer data sharing. It ensures compatibility across tools and data formats, enabling the integration of farm management systems and other digital solutions. The module aligns with EU Data Act standards, prioritizing data privacy and ownership while fostering collaboration and efficiency.

Benefits:

-Interoperability: Connects diverse platforms, reducing manual data management.

-Data Control: Empowers users to manage and secure their data

-Scalability: Adaptable for farms of various sizes, cooperatives and advisors.

Practical Recommendations:

-Farmers: Can use this module to exchange data (e.g. digital calendars) with other farmers that they trust even if they are using non-interoperable systems provided by different software vendors.

-Advisors: Leverage consolidated data from groups of farmers even if they use non-interoperable FMISs. This provides advanced information richness and hence improved control and decision making, helping advisors to have close to real-time access to farming activities even for groups of farmers (e.g. members of farmers’ association).

-Cooperatives: Facilitate collaborative decision-making and benchmarking among members.

• Detailed documentation, integration guides, and support

Problem:
There are already available numerous digital services and data sources aiming to support farmers and advisors on decision-making for every day farming tasks. In many cases, these services are offered under low-cost subscription schemes (or even free for limited usage), however, they remain significantly under-exploited. 

Solution:

The Farmtopia Data Integration Module supports data ingestion from a predefined - but extendable- list of providers encompassing point-based sensor data to large-scale satellite

imagery. Specifically, it integrates and makes available through a standardized API and semantics: weather data forecast, earth observation data products and infestation predictions for selected pests and diseases.

Practical Recommendations:

The Farmtopia Data Integration Module is offered as an easy to download and install software component (following the EUPL scheme). SMEs and AgTech providers can kick start their projects without reimplementing from scratch basic functionalities supporting the development of cost-effective ADSs.

Future Development:

Future updates will integrate additional data sources, weather services from ECMWF, and satellite based Earth Observation data products.

• GitLab Link

Problem:

Small farms struggle to adopt Agricultural Digital Services (ADS), leading to low uptake. This issue highlights the need for cost-effective ADS tailored to small and medium farms to enhance environmental and economic performance while closing the digital gap.

Solution:

The Farmtopia Digital Field Book, developed by Innovation Technology Cluster Murska Sobota and under Digital Innovation Hub for Agriculture and Food Production, is a key tool within the Farmtopia Farm Management Information System designed to address these challenges. It makes easier for small farms to capture and manage essential data, including: Farmers activities: planting and harvesting; Observations: tracking plant growth, soil sampling, etc.; Parcel properties: mapping field locations, noting climate conditions; Assets: managing farming equipment, machinery, and inventory like fertilizers. 

Accessible via personal computers or mobile devices, it includes three services:

-Field Book as a Service: Co-developed with farmers and the Institute of Agriculture and Forestry Murska Sobota, this tool is tested in Farmtopias Sustainable Innovation Pilot 5, featuring:

1. A user-friendly interface for data entry and visualization,
2. A backend system for smooth data processing,
3. Secure storage for structured data and files.

-Data Exchange API: Enables secure data sharing, letting farmers connect with others in the Farmtopia ecosystem using standard data formats. 

-Open-Source Software: Offers an open, easily deployable, and adaptable solution. It lets developers create custom tools while maintaining strong data management capabilities.

Practical Recommendations:

The Farmtopia FMIS ties these services into a comprehensive system, offering a user-friendly interface, secure data access, and tools to streamline agricultural operations. By bringing advanced digital tools to small farms, the Farmtopia DFB supports sustainability, boosts productivity, and helps small farms succeed in the digital age.

• Example of the tool displayed on a mobile phone

Problem:

A key technical requirement for agricultural digital solutions has been interoperability between systems and modules. Different agricultural digital solutions must be able to exchange data and know what the data means. This requires a standardized vocabulary (or ontology) that can be used by different components.

Solution:

The Farmtopia project developed a “Common Semantic Model” building on past work and existing recognized standards for the agricultural domain. Reuse was made of existing models as much as possible so that nearly all concepts are well recognized and understood. The model is formally expressed and follows the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). 

Benefits:

-Interoperability: Connects diverse platforms, reducing manual data management.

-Data Control: Empowers users to manage and secure their data 

-Scalability: Adaptable for farms of various sizes, cooperatives, and advisors.

Practical recommendations:

-For Farmers: Check that your applications use semantics and are thus interoperable.

-For Farm Advisors: Take advantage of interoperability to unify data for benchmarking purposes.

-For Agricultural Digital Solution developers: Make sure any future software development uses the Farmtopia CSM to ensure ongoing compatibility and interoperability.

Access detailed documentation, integration guides, and support at GitLab Link. Resources include tutorials and best practices to maximize the module's utility.

• GitLab - Farmtopia Semantic Model

Problem: 

Despite significant investments, the adoption rate of Agricultural Digital Solutions among small and medium-sized farms remains quite low. Small farms face challenges such as high upfront costs, uncertain benefits, solutions incompatible with their needs, lack of digital skills, and others.

Solution:

Farmtopia stimulates a paradigm shift in ADSs development by introducing a farm-centric, bottom-up approach that prioritizes real-world problem-solving, inclusivity, and collaboration between farmers and tech providers. This model introduces innovative business models - such as pay-as-you-go - that reduce costs whilst ensuring long-term financial viability. Farmtopia also develops open-source services specifically designed to leverage public infrastructure and data, enabling AgTech providers to develop advanced digital solutions at a low cost.

Practical Recommendation: 

This approach is operationalised through 9 Sustainable Innovation Pilots across 7 sectors and 12 EU locations: 

-Phase 1 - Co-development: Collaborative process analysing user needs and functional requirements. The solution is co-designed and configured to align with the unique characteristics of the farms, as well as the specific demands of the sector and crop addressed.

-Phase 2 - Deployment: The ADS is implemented in the field, operating over a complete cultivation cycle. Farmers integrate the ADS into their daily practices, and data is collected on key agricultural variables to evaluate performance.

-Phase 3 - Refinement: The ADS and its business model are refined to ensure maximum compatibility with the farmer’s needs. An additional round of pilot operations is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the improved solution and confirm its readiness for broader application.

-Phase 4 - Scaling: Focused on showcasing the ADS’s benefits to the wider agricultural community. Open days, demonstrations, and marketing campaigns are organized to build awareness and encourage broader adoption.