Periodic Reporting for period 3 - IoF2020 (Internet of Food and Farm 2020)
Reporting period: 2020-01-01 to 2021-03-31
The goal was ambitious: to make precision farming a reality and to take a vital step towards a more sustainable food value chain. With the help of IoT technologies higher yields and better-quality produce are within reach. Pesticide and fertilizer use will drop and overall efficiency is optimized. IoT technologies also enable better traceability of food, leading to increased food safety.
Thirty-three use-cases organised around five trials (arable, dairy, fruits, meat and vegetables) developed, tested and demonstrated the use of IoT technologies in an operational farm environment all over Europe. IoF2020 uses a lean multi-actor approach focusing on user acceptability, stakeholder engagement and the development of sustainable business models.
Business support was provided to the Use Cases in terms of monitoring KPIs, developing business models, user acceptance testing, market studies and governance aspects (incl. data ownership, privacy, liability and ethical issues). This has resulted in market uptake of the IoT solutions or component parts; more than half of the Use Cases managed to have revenues during the project lifetime. Other use cases at least have made significant steps towards market readiness of their solutions. The activities and experiences were put together in a business modelling toolbox that will be used in succeeding projects, in particular the SmartAgriHubs project. Another result is the significant contribution to the Code of Conduct for agricultural data sharing and further development of that will also be included in new projects. Lessons learned in the Use case that were relevant for the public sector have been collected in a report on policy recommendations.
IoF2020 actively worked successfully on development and expansion of the various ecosystems on use case and project level and beyond amongst others by communication, dissemination, organizing workshops, demonstrations and events. This was done through active involvement of European and national communities from the demand- and supply-side of IoT, including industry associations and cooperatives, European Innovation Partnerships, Technology Platforms and ERAnets. This has led to a substantial quantitative and qualitative growth of the IoF2020 ecosystem.
The IoF2020 project has demonstrated how IoT can be implemented and used in farming and food production for many different sectors and application areas. This was done by integrating and re-using available IoT technologies based on open architectures and standards. By providing active business support many solutions or components have already found their way to the market ensuring a large-scale uptake and others have made significant progress towards market readiness. A large and coherent European ecosystem has been developed, which will continue to grow and flower through new projects and Digital Innovation Hubs, especially supported by the SmartAgriHubs project. In this way IoF2020 has fostered a large-scale take-up of IoT in the European farming and food domain boosted digital innovation and consequently improved productivity and sustainability.