Building an Interoperable, Data-Driven, Innovative and Sustainable European Agri-Food Sector

The DEMETER Project is a large-scale deployment of farmer centric interoperable smart farming-IoT based platforms delivered through a series of 20 pilots across 18 countries (15 States in the EU). Involving 60 partners, DEMETER adopts a multi-actor approach across the value chain (demand and supply), with 25 deployment sites, 6,000 farmers and over 38,000 devices and sensors being deployed and participants involved come from different production sectors (dairy, meat, vegetables, fruit and arable crops), production systems (conventional and organic) and different farm sizes and types, optimising the data analysis obtained across multiple farms. DEMETER will demonstrate the real-life potential of advanced standards-based interoperability between IoT technologies by adapting and extending existing standards into an over-arching Agricultural Information Model, concurrently ensuring security, privacy and business confidentiality across the full value chain in multiple agri-food operational environments. DEMETER will encompass a multi system and multi data source integration considering not only IoT but legacy systems, open data, geographical and satellite information, and in general will provide an open and interoperable data integration model. DEMETER displays how an integrated approach to business modelling and user acceptance can support sustainable farming and food production systems, provide safe food and support farmers in their decision-making in ‘doing more with less’. DEMETER will bring new business opportunities on the farm and in the wider agri-food economy, while concurrently contributing to the safeguarding of Europe’s precious natural resources. DEMETER’s goal is the creation of a secure and sustainable European IoT technology and business ecosystem whose impact could be transformative in the EC food and agriculture sector, and potentially across the world.

In the frame of the AI-based agri-food value chain optimization R&D in DEMETER, Vicomtech is collaborating with industrial and applied research partners all over Europe to develop and verify in production a library of predictive models for the forecasting and the optimization arable farming and horticulture.
The models are already being used for olive production in Italy by private companies offering agricultural decision support systems, and will be progressively applied to diverse agri- and horticultural species in larger and larger geographical areas as well as to future scenarios related to the sustainability of agri-food value chains in the face of climate emergency and world population growth.
Our models are able to forecast yields and to support decisions related to watering and nutrients and to the control of pests in local environments that we are progressively extending in terms of geography and of forecasting ability.
A crucial aspect is related to our focus on the aspects of privacy, confidentiality and security that are so crucial for the security of food in our present and in future European societies.   

Project information. Grant agreement ID: 857202, EU Contribution €14.998.282,38.