STEPLA, https://youtu.be/5NcgzfTEGqE, http://www.stepla.es/en_index.html, developed by the Spanish SME MISC International (SensoWave) is the first ICT service platform for extensive breeding farms full management that offers location, monitoring, and traceability capabilities to locate livestock individuals in real time. STEPLA monitors in real time their condition detecting anomalies and facilitating farm management, including meat traceability and environmental impact of livestock farming activites. STEPLA integrates stakeholders such as veterinarians, suppliers, insurance companies, regulatory authorities, consumers, and every elements within the distribution chain. After being incubated by the SmartAgrifFood acceleration programme http://smartagrifood.com, and finalizing pilots in several farms in Spain, STEPLA reached their first selling agreement for the cow (beef) sector in 2015. With SMEInst-2 project STEPLA+, SensoWave envisages to carry out the needed adaptations to cover other livestock, targeting pigs, sheep and goats, and horses, and to include new functionalities (temperature sensors, more complex bigdata based algorithms, etc.), in order to increase STEPLA+ market penetration becoming the main solution for European livestock farmers in the coming years. STEPLA+ will reach commercialisation step in 2018-19, resulting in a 4-year ROI of 309% for SensoWave, and generating 204 new jobs, plus positively impacting the European livestock farming sector (also by increasing exports) and the European citizens welfare.

Analysis of the Direct Payment Scheme and farm incomes by DG-AGRI shows that on average about 50 % of the European livestock farms are reliant on subsidies. Currently, precision farming is only profitable for big farms and the investment is always difficult to pay back. Besides, there is an increasing demand on more information on food quality and safety and traceability. Thus, the EU livestock sector is in need of innovative tools to (i) increase its efficiency and become an attractive activity for the younger generations and (ii) assure full transparency and traceability along the supply chain. In this context, CATTLECHAIN 4.0 project aims to develop an integral smart solution to support the EU livestock sector to overcome the aforementioned challenges. By recording different parameters from the cows with IoT wearables, and analysing this data with Artificial Intelligence algorithms, farmers get a decision support tool about their farm condition, so they can take immediate action if any issue arises and prevent losses/health issues. Besides, by aggregating the data from multiple cows and farms in a blockchain based cloud platform, consumers and public authorities can access a traceability tool with truthful and secure data about the meat/dairy supply chain. Finally, aligned with consumers’ demands and thanks to the information gather by the IoT wearables, an Animal Welfare Seal will be created that guarantees that the meat and dairy products meet the highest animal welfare standards. This ground-breaking technologies and services will be validated in ambitious trial scenarios with 5.000 cows. The project will boost the growth of the two industries involved, firstly of the coordinator SENSO a tech-startup that will exponentially increase its turnover, and secondly of NATRUS, company specialised in premium hamburguers, who will gain a competitive advantage by being able to completely trace back their products.

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness, as well as an increasing labour shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas. Furthermore, reliable detection, accurate identification and proper quantification of pathogens and other factors affecting both plant and animal health, are critical to be kept under control in order to reduce economic expenditures, trade disruptions and even human health risks. AFarCloud will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real time data mining techniques. The AFarCloud project also aims to make farming robots accessible to more users by enabling farming vehicles to work in a cooperative mesh, thus opening up new applications and ensuring re-usability, as heterogeneous standard vehicles can combine their capabilities in order to lift farmer revenue and reduce labour costs. The achievements from AFarCloud will be demonstrated in 3 holistic demonstrators (Finland, Spain and Italy), including cropping and livestock management scenarios and 8 local demonstrators (Latvia, Sweden, Spain and Czech Republic) in order to test specific functionalities and validate project results in relevant environments located in different European regions. AFarCloud outcomes will strengthen partners’ market position boosting their innovation capacity and addressing industrial needs both at EU and international levels. The consortium represents the whole ICT-based farming solutions’ value chain, including all key actors needed for the development, demonstration and future market uptake of the precision farming framework targeted in the project.