PROMIoTOR: Deep Learning for a more sustainable agriculture
AIR Institute collaborates with EMBIO DIAGNOSTICS and Cyprus - TAMIC on the PROMIoTOR project. Its aims is to foster sustainable agriculture through the construction of an agricultural cyber-physical platform aimed at the sustainability of Smart Farming production in different crops (vineyard, olive tree, cereals, tomato and others) in terms of water use, carbon footprint and the health of people and soil in the processes involved, using low consumption IoT (Internet of Things) devices and Deep Learning techniques.
PROMIoTOR is part of the TETRAMAX initiative, one of the main European drivers of digitisation, aimed at industries oriented to computer customisation. We share an article with you, published by TETRAMAX, in which our project is provided as an example of a successful case.
Nowadays, on a highly competitive and globalized food market, consumers have more options to choose from and their concern is about how the products they consume are produced and how the production impacts the environment in terms of water, carbon footprint, or health.
Nonetheless, there are different pests and plagues that negatively affect the agricultural production, provoking loss in harvests and increasing production costs because of the use of pesticides, whose doses must be limited while balancing yield and sustainability. EMBIO’s customers are farmers that need to provide their consumers with a differentiated green product, following precision agriculture methods are respectful of the environment and health. In this regard, TAMIC provides Low-Power IoT agrometeorological stations for measuring different parameters (rain, temperature, humidity, leaf wetness) in crops in real-time to build precision agriculture applications.
In this project, the AIR Institute used its know-how in Deep Learning and Recommender Systems to gather data from TAMIC’s Low-Power IoT stations. This data was used to feed AIR’s DL-based sustainability predictors, which provide EMBIO customers with sustainability indicators regarding their farming processes. Consequently, EMBIO’s customers are given the ability to modify these processes based on the indicators to provide consumers with greener products.
Role of TETRAMAX as Digital Innovation Hub
The TETRAMAX DIH assisted in the development of the PROMIoTOR project by providing support at the technical and result-exploitation level. At the technical level, its assistance helped to improve the end-user experience of the platform. In turn, DIH helped to analyse other competing solutions and to identify possible distribution channels in other countries, improving the business plan.
Impact
According to Eurostat, there are countries in EU-27 where the use of pesticides has been increased during last years. Although Spain and France are world leaders in ecological viticulture (FiBL, 2014), these trends are not the same for other crops. The largest organic producers in the world are India, Ethiopia and Mexico, and the largest organic agricultural lands are in Australia, Argentina and the United States. Nonetheless, the highest per capita consumers are in Europe (Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden). This means that large EU-27 producer countries take the risk of losing the opportunities with high-value organic and ecological food as they must compete worldwide for the European consumers. In this regard, the PROMIoTOR platform will help EU farmers follow a sustainable agricultural methodology and allow them to provide worldwide consumers with the measured parameters and indicators of the farming production chain.
One of the key impacts of PROMIoTOR, relevant for TAMIC and EMBIO partners, include one improved product (Low Power IoT station) and one new product: deep learning-based sustainability platform, with a potential to achieve 20% savings in water, energy, and pant products in agriculture.