Objectives of the service
The project laid the foundations for an upgrade of “Poderi”, developed by AEDIT to support farm advisors with Decision Support Systems (DSS) for planning agricultural operations and tools for data storage and sharing between advisors and farmers.
The evolution of the current version of Poderi seeks to facilitate the retrieval of farm-related data by integrating different data sources into a single digital tool, consisting of an App and a website. This addresses the lack of interoperability among tools used for agricultural advisory services, by connecting data from external sources, such as the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) and the national livestock database. Advisors also struggle with having a complete overview of the fields' status of the farms. Poderi is planned to include tools to visualise fields status (i.e., vigour, water status) using vegetation indices. Moreover, beside crop DSS for fertilisation, irrigation and pest management, a livestock building block will be developed, including a DSS for grazing based on space data. Furthermore, data collected with GNSS sensors (i.e., neck collars for livestock), often not utilised efficiently in agriculture, will be integrated in Poderi to facilitate data collection.
Users and their needs
Key customers for Poderi are farm advisors, whether they are individual professionals, part of an organisation, or professional advisors from the agrochemical industry, and large-scale farmers who own extensive landholdings. However, since the basic use of smartphones is widespread, users can be advisors, large scale farmers but also smallholders.
As emerged from the user engagement activities carried out, main user needs connected to next generation FMS are:
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accessing all the data needed in a single tool;
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visualising and summarising the crop status of all monitored fields;
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accessing weather data;
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easy way to register agricultural activities;
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receiving support for livestock management;
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chat for communication between advisors and farmers.
The challenge of the project is to design Poderi ensuring interoperability and the utilisation of space-based data to support agricultural advisory services, while maintaining a user-friendly interface and an easy scalable system.
Service/ system concept
Poderi provides support for agronomic and administrative aspects of agricultural activities, based on the following main functions: Decision Support Systems for agricultural consultancy and farmer decision-making, data recording for agricultural operations and field monitoring, data sharing between farmers and agricultural advisors.
Poderi provides the following specific features to its users:
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advanced field monitoring functions based on satellite data;
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improved access to weather data ;
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interoperability with external sources used for farm consultancy (i.e. LPIS, national livestock database, Farmers Logbook);
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DSS for crops;
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advanced functionalities for livestock management, including a DSS for optimising grazing, based on EO and GNSS.
Poderi architecture is based on a set of microservices dedicated to specific sections, supported by two front-end applications, one mobile and one desktop.
Space Added Value
The upgraded version of Poderi is planned to include the involvement of the space assets:
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space-based indices for field and crop monitoring.
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space-based weather data.
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data from GNSS sensors.
Including satellite data in Poderi aims to improve field monitoring, by visualising the maps of vegetation status and including functionalities for benchmarking . Users are interested in accessing resources able to give them an overview of the field status, especially considering advisors supporting many farms. The dashboard for vegetation indices visualisation and benchmarking enables farm advisors to optimise field visits and to have an overview of the spatial variability in the fields. Users are interested mainly in visualising vegetation indices for monitoring crop homogeneity and water status.
The integration of space-based weather data responds to the user's need of having access to weather time series both for planning agricultural operations and as input data for DSS. Indeed, sometimes weather stations (public or private) near the farms are not available, or there may be interruptions in the data supply.
GNSS are usually not properly exploited in the farms, thus the integration of GNSS sensors for animals can improve livestock management.
Current Status
At the end of the project, activities were successfully completed, including the user engagement, the definition of the system architecture and of the definition of the business model.
User engagement activities were carried out distributing surveys and having meetings with experts, reaching about 80 entities. The results were used to define the Poderi value proposition based on pains, gains and user needs of different stakeholders. Moreover, a mock-up for the visualisation of vegetation indices was produced and commented on with potential users.
System requirements and system architecture definition were carried out based on the results of the user engagement activities, and consequently, the business model was defined, outlining a clear pathway to revenue and scalability.
The next goal is to leverage the experience gained during the KickStart to propose a Demo project aimed at bringing Poderi to the level of a commercially ready solution.
