According to the FAO, up to 40% of food crops worldwide are lost annually due to pests and plant diseases, resulting in 1.3 bn tons/year of food wasted. At the same time, EU and country-specific regulations limit the amount of chemicals that farmers can use to fight crop diseases. Farmers lack the time and knowledge to make sure to comply with all rules and chose the best course of action. Thanks to EICA Agrivi will develop a brand new software, an AI-driven digital advisory tool that will be built on our proprietary algorithms, agricultural and CPP knowledge base and will guide farmers through the whole process: when to spray based on AI pest risk detection, which products to use, which rules must be respected, when is safe to harvest. A multidimensional impact is expected: improved productivity and food safety, less post harvest food waste, decreased usage of pesticides, improved soil health and biodiversity.

European farming is strongly affected by the high-impact of climate change emerging as a major threat on agriculture in Europe and across the world. Even though the digital transformation of agriculture promises to solve numerous environmental, economic and societal problems, and important steps have taken place towards this goal, agriculture sector is the least digitized of all major productive activities. By increasing digitalisation and adopting climate-smart practices in agricultural makes it is possible to produce products with ever higher efficiency and ever lower environmental impact. However, adoption of a climate-smart agriculture is not only a farmers’ concern. It is an interdisciplinary issue for agronomists, ICT experts, farmers, breeders etc. that Higher Education Institutions need to respond by developing new skills and technologies in their curricula.SmartROOT focuses on the preparation of a new Joint Master Degree program in the field of Mixed Farming Systems (MFS) by introducing user-friendly ICT tools to improve the resilience of agriculture subject to climate change. The rational is not only to prepare an international master degree program. It is also to actively involve students in the preparation process, receive their assessment and feedback on the ICT tools and material developed in terms of their operability, the user-friendly environment, the knowledge gained, the extent of international cooperation and the extent of satisfaction of their expectations. It will be a dynamic, inter-active process which ends to a Joint Master Degree program ready to run after the completion of the project.SmartROOT not only aims to prepare the future professionals in the agricultural sector, but also promotes ways for small and medium-sized farms to benefit from the new technologies by introducing and familiarising farmers to digital technologies. Farmers will gain knowledge on methodologies to foster the synergies between agricultural production, climate change mitigation and adaptation. SmartROOT expected results can be summarised in the following lines:1) Build an international Joint Master Degree (JMD) program in Mixed Farming Systems ready to run after the completion of the project2) Actively involve students to the preparation, test and assessment of a JMD prior its official launch3) Enforce students’ insight to perceive the global trends on the agriculture domain in combination to climate change mitigation4) Increase students’ and stakeholders (e.g. farmers) awareness on environment friendly agricultural trends to minimise the climate change consequences5) Bridge the needs of agriculture experts and ICT scientists and familiarise farmers with ICT technological advancements6) Develop open educational and management platforms available to be used by individual farmers and agriculture professionals7) Act as a stepping stone towards the new challenge for HEIs in Europe as described under the Erasmus+ program: to create a network in the frame of the European Universities initiative SmartROOT’s results will be achieved through the following outputs:- O1 MFS e-book - O2 Open Hub for Knowledge Exchange - O3 SmartROOT Virtual Farm Hub- O4 MFS Educational Management Platform - O5 Augmented Reality Learning Environment - O6 SmartROOT Assessment Toolkit and Curriculum preparation1.Introduce the context of CSA and Mixed Farming Systems to HEIs involved through co-design of their curricula2.Educate students to new technological solutions for climate smart agriculture such as such as smart sensors, robots, UAVs, advanced tracking systems, long-range IoT-enabled sensors, middleware and gateways for extending the size of the potential monitoring area, facilitating, thus, data collection and processing of different farming systems at the same time, enabling optimal decisions,3.Develop an Open Access Climate-Smart agriculture platform to foster, support and promote Mixed Farming Systems (MFS), by facilitating the design, the deployment, and the management of crop-livestock-forestry combinations towards sustainable, efficient, and climate-aware MFS systems.4.Develop a continuous training platform, in the national language of each partner’s country, designed for the socio-professional network and based on the content and results of the 3-year project 5.Foster a European network between academia, experienced farmers and stakeholders, to engage end-users and allow exchange of knowledge on best practices on various combinations of mixed farming systems

EFRA will explore how extreme data mining, aggregation and analytics may address major scientific, economic and societal challenges associated with the safety and quality of the food that European consumers eat. EFRA’s goals are: i) develop and test solutions to discover and distil food risk data from heterogeneous and dispersed/scarce data sources with minimal delay and appropriate format; ii) design relevant human aspects & interactions with users to measure usefulness for human risk prevention actions in real-world use-cases iii) demonstrate how solutions enable the development of trustworthy, accurate, green and fair AI systems for food risk prevention iv) achieve groundbreaking advances in performance and effectiveness of food risk data discovery, collection, mining, filtering, and processing; v) integrate relevant technologies (big data, IoT, AI) to foster links to food data innovator communities vi) position its contributions into the overall ecosystem of public & private stakeholders that share data, technology and infrastructure to ensure the safety and quality of food in Europe. To achieve these goals, EFRA will design, test, and deploy tools and undertake appropriate initiatives to facilitate their uptake, elicit feedback, and engage stakeholders. The EFRA tools are: (i) EFRA Data Hub, offering intelligent crawlers and data annotation & linking modules to search, mine, process, annotate, and link dispersed, multilingual, heterogeneous, and deep/hidden food safety data sources (ii) EFRA Analytics Powerhouse: offering modules running over a green cloud HPC that distil useful insights & signals from the EFRA Data Hub to train privacy-preserving, explainable, green food risk prediction AI models (iii) EFRA Data & Analytics Marketplace: A front-facing user-friendly web app that allows interested users to discover, purchase/use, and contribute data, AI models, and analytics modules, creating an economy where data holders and data consumers engage and trade.

The Food Safety Market (TheFSM) aims to deliver an industrial data platform that will significantly boost the way that food certification takes place in Europe. It brings together and builds upon existing innovations from innovative ICT SMEs to deliver a uniquely open and collaborative virtual environment that will facilitate the exchange and connection of data between different food safety actors who are interested in sharing information critical to certification. Extensive piloting is going to take place with subsidiaries of the TÜV AUSTRIA GROUP, a European provider of inspection and certification services that is a pioneer in the digitalization of the inspection business that has a presence in more than 40 countries, an annual turnover of almost 210 MEuros, and over 1,700 employees. In this way, the project is going to accelerate the pace by which this group adopts digital innovation and offers data-driven services to its clients in around the world. Eventually, TheFSM aspires to catalyse the digital evolution of the quite traditional but very data intensive business ecosystem that the global food certification market involves.