07-03-2023

The Kick-Off Meeting (KOM) of the European research project “AgriDataValue - Smart Farm and Agri-environmental Big Data Space” (Call HORIZON-CL6-2022-GOVERNANCE-01-11), led by Synelixis (Greece), already a partner of Almaviva in other European projects, was held in Athens on February 22nd and 23rd, with 31 participants including Almaviva. Attendees of the KOM included, among others, Lara Congiu, Project Officer, and Doris Marquardt, Program Officer of the European Commission - DG AGRI - Unit F2, Research and Innovation, who outlined the European strategies and the commission's effort to meet European and global challenges. By 2025 Earth’s population will have reached 10 billion, and estimates predict that agricultural production will need to increase by up to 65% to feed all its inhabitants.

29 partnerships competed in the AgriDataValue Project, of which only three were winners, securing €7.5 million, equivalent to 50% of the allocated budget (€15 million). For the next six years, 31 partners from 14 European countries will work together, seeking to make a difference. The ambitious goal of the AgriDataValue project is to experiment with and develop innovative technologies, becoming a real game changer for Smart Farming 4.0 and agro-environmental monitoring. The watchword is: “Optimizing agricultural production through knowledge”. The introduction of an innovative and intelligent “platform of platforms” that is widespread and uses multiple technologies will be paramount. The adopted approach combines state-of-the-art big data, blockchain, and IoT technologies (to name just a few), as well as new business models and agro-environmental policies. The focus is on the innovative use of artificial intelligence models, federated machine learning (FDML), and Human Explainable AI (XAI) that will contribute to increasing trust and overcoming barriers that prevent end-users from more widely adopting these technologies.

Twenty-three pilot projects will be developed in nine European countries, covering a total of 181,000 hectares of cultivated land and more than 2,000 heads of livestock, with the installation of more than 4,500 IoT sensors to collect real-time data. The protagonist of AgriDataValue will be a multidisciplinary partnership made up of universities, research centers, technological companies, farms, and paying agencies.

In addition to Almaviva’s participation in many of the project’s activities, it will also be responsible for two specific tasks: one dedicated to XAI and the other focused on projecting climate impact indicators on agricultural activities in order to ascertain how they’re connected to relevant indicators regarding agriculture and biodiversity, the ultimate goal of which is to determine how vulnerable agricultural activities are to the impacts of climate change.

Alessandra Raffone and Sergio Sestili participated in the KOM on behalf of Almaviva.

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