Driving agrifood Innovation in Italy: testing, validation, and data-driven solutions
The Italian node is a network of distributed Testing and Experimental facilities between Northern and Southern regions, exploiting the best climatic conditions for outdoor and the most advanced tools for greenhouse productions in real-world environments, to validate pre-market solutions that help Italian farmers with their top-quality productions during both, growing phase (sustainability, efficient use of resources, yield) and with post-harvesting activities (traceability, assessing the impact on quality).
In particular, the node consists of three clusters, one in the Alpine region of Trento (with Partners FBK and FEM jointly providing AI and Agronomic competencies as well as experimental facilities on viticulture and fruit products), one in the center of Po Valley in Milan (with PoliMI and UMIL providing AI and Robotics benchmarking competences on solutions for fourth range and organic productions) and one located in the South near Naples (with UNINA providing similar competences on Mediterranean products). Services and competences of the Italian node also cover data management aspects, setting guidelines for the use of self-sovereignty technologies to federate data spaces, helping agrifoodTEF mature a unique and unprecedented set of AI validation dataset assets aggregated from various data feeds and experimentation results. It is expected this will progressively accelerate validation of TEF customers' solutions and become a key element of the agrifoodTEF sustainability plan.
More specifically, the Italian TEF node brings together experts in the domains of field-data collection (IoT, remote sensing imagery, satellite), robotics for actuation, mechanistic models, machine learning models, and agricultural data spaces to incentivise technology adoption, data-monetization, and traceability of products and processes.
The long-term goal is to provide, at Italian node level, the means to support:
- The growers, to ensure their innovation investment is well targeted towards validating solutions and their efforts can then be rewarded with a positive ROI and with improved quality products;
- The SMEs operating in the field, providing them better environments to stress-test their solutions before hitting the market;
- The big companies operating in the agri-food sector, giving them new possibilities for finding more easily and transparently quality suppliers, as well as for scouting novel business ideas and new data-monetization alleys;
- The universities and research centers working in the digital agriculture domain, giving them additional support to exploit their competencies in a more concrete and business-oriented context.
