This project's research activities officially ended in March 2021. Legacy in SmartAgriHubs Portal

Data-driven farming: dare to step into new business models

We are living in times of constant technological advancement. Currently, wristbands can measure our fitness level, fridges reorder food that got consumed and drones are able to deliver packages to our doorstep. These new technological developments do not pass by agriculture, but are often included into the agricultural sector.

The current trend in agriculture is to connect all sorts of devices to the internet, called Internet of Things (IoT). In agriculture IoT will bring us the ability to remotely monitor our crops, fields, animals, machines and many more things in real time. With real-time monitoring information agricultural production can be controlled more optimal and enable us to face challenges such as food security, food safety, transparency, animal wellbeing, antibiotic residue reduction, nitrate leaching, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and many more.

Within IoF2020 we believe that we can contribute to face these challenges by supporting the development and adaption of these technologies and making them fit for the agricultural sector. To prove the potential of IoT in agriculture we will apply these technologies on a large number of test farms all around Europe.

A major aspect to make IoT in agriculture a success is its contribution to support decision making and optimize control. To improve decision making data needs to be exchanged. An algorithm running on your farm data alone can give you clever advice, but the same algorithm running on the data of 1000 farms of all sizes all over the world is exponentially smarter.

To get the smarter applications, we need to create a network of connected farms that are willing to exchange their data to receive best knowledge, forecasts and automation by algorithm providers. The vision is that with such a network, farmers can monetize the data created by sensors on their farm land and receive an even better performance of their decision support applications. To develop such a network, we must find the value for each participant. Within WP4 we will focus, amongst others, on the development of such a value network and taking into account ethical and legal aspect.

To support innovative developments our business team consults our 19 use-cases in the 5 trials arable, dairy, fruits, vegetables and meat. We support the use-cases regarding their individual go-to-market strategy and exploitation models. According to the individual specifics of a use-case we assemble these components for each minimum viable product (MVP) cycle, perform user acceptability testing, iterate based on learnings and thus contribute to a working business model for the application, service or product offered by the use-case.

In order to prepare our work, the business team of IoF2020 already produced an insightful market and trend analysis for the IoF2020 use-cases. This report outlines the key market trends and defines the impact indicators using the PESTLE framework. PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental. If you are interested, please download the document here. Furthermore, we have a presentation showing 50 business models.

To support innovation, we are not only offering presentations and reports, but organize different workshops, webinars and individual consultations. If you need business support, do not hesitate and contact your business chair. Furthermore, we are always keen on receiving suggestion on what kind of support use-cases are looking for. So please innovate with us and let’s build agriculture 4.0 together.

Author: Alexander Berlin

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