Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness, as well as an increasing labor shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas. AFarCloud EU project will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labor costs.
Spectral Engines joins a newly started project as one of the 60 active partners from across Europe. The goal of the AFarCloud project is to create a network of sensors that enables critical farming-related parameters to be collected and processed in a single unified platform for meaningful intelligence and future optimization of farming process and resource use. The total project budget is ca. 28M€ and it will run until August 2021.
Spectral Engines will be designing and building new hardware solutions for field use of the NIRONE Spectral Sensors, and designing software interfaces between the sensor software and the cloud data processing and management. Short-term goals include silage and silage composition analysis with NIRONE Spectral Sensors, while in the longer run sensor-generated data would be used to give directions on how to optimize processes such as grass field fertilization, livestock feeding and silage mixing.
The achievements from AFarCloud will be demonstrated in early laboratory trials, holistic demonstrators (Finland, Spain and Italy), including cropping and livestock management scenarios and local demonstrators (Latvia, Sweden and Czech Republic) in order to test specific functionalities and validate project results in relevant environments located in different European regions.
AFarCloud outcomes will strengthen partners’ market position, boosting their innovation capacity and addressing industrial needs both at EU and international levels. AFarCloud will enable and extend the usage of smart farming by combining experts from Industry 4.0, smart mobility and Internet of Things (IoT) with agricultural solution provider and end user. The consortium represents the whole ICT-based farming solutions’ value chain, including all key actors needed for the development, demonstration and future market uptake of the precision farming framework targeted in the project.
For Spectral Engines, the project opens insights into the farming applications, and enables the further development of our novel NIRONE Sensors and cloud platform with intelligent machine learning capabilities. Spectral sensors and IoT bring a variety of possibilities to farming, from improving the quality of produced milk to soil analysis and fertilization optimization. Gathering data via smart sensors to a cloud and analyzing it helps reaching the full potential of farming operations.
More information about the project: AFarCloud project website
