The wine market has changed dramatically in the last fifty years, moving from small national markets, scarcely spread and limited to specialists, to the globalized web revolution. Wine industry represents an important part of both agriculture and food industry in many countries (i.e ES, FR and IT represent alone a total of 32% of world vineyard surface area, being within top 5 world producers of grapes in 2018). However, wine industry is threatened by counterfeit products and illicit trades. The overall research and technology development goal of TRACEWINDU is to improve productivity of vineyards by using novel combination of Plant Protection Products while simultaneously geographic origin analysis is integrated in a multi-approach strategy to ensure wine traceability/authentication. Such approach will be correlated with the obtained outputs of sensory analysis to generate a labelling score chart data in form of product passport included in smart tags. The smart tag are physical labels with unique item-level identifiers in form of QR codes for digital and dynamic information sharing and provisioning of all relevant product information throughout product’s lifecycle, and transparency of product data facilitating decentralized blockchain technology. Through implemented smart tags, TRACEWINDU supports tracing bottles back directly to producer and each time a bottle changes hands, the origin is updated, and ownership is transferred, and those bottles certified at the time and place of production, by producers will carry even more value in secondary markets. Overall, TRACEWINDU aims to foster, improve and develop permanent international and inter-sector collaboration between academic research centers and private sector, enhancing the exchange of knowledge, best practices, know-how, innovations, experience, mutual cooperation and culture of work at different regions and countries (ES, FR, IT, ME, RS, AR) through a series of scheduled secondments.

Modern agriculture is largely based on new technological solutions closely related to the increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and various software solutions, not only for monitoring, but also for managing production processes. In Bosnia and Montenegro agriculture remains largely dependent on manual farming, with technical and technological solutions being poorly explored. At the same time, both countries have strong ICT sectors employing sizeable number of highly educated professionals who develop front-end software solutions. Building a sustainable regional future for the large extent hence depends on the intersection of the two which, even though a concern that should be addressed in all parts of society as a critical strategic area for development and economic activity, has in so far not been given a fair attention in educational and training practices. With this in mind VIRAL project aims to trigger higher level of knowledge, skills and application with reference to use of ICT in agricultural education and training in both formal and informal settings. Henceforth, VIRAL connects key HEIs and industry learning communities’ participants in the process of co-creating and testing new in and out of the classroom methods and practices, initiating professional pitch competitions (hackathons), and spinning off a distinctive regional university-business collaboration platform. Core learning experience involving agricultural and IT engineering teaching staff and students and passing on the knowledge gained onto professional advisory services and collaboration practices with the companies in the field is realized through intensive training experience and study visits to European universities. On the impact level boosted ICTs use in agriculture underpins sustainable rural development, increases resilience of rural families, improves access of farmers to needed services, and further empowers women and youth living prospects in rural areas.

The DEMETER Project is a large-scale deployment of farmer centric interoperable smart farming-IoT based platforms delivered through a series of 20 pilots across 18 countries (15 States in the EU). Involving 60 partners, DEMETER adopts a multi-actor approach across the value chain (demand and supply), with 25 deployment sites, 6,000 farmers and over 38,000 devices and sensors being deployed and participants involved come from different production sectors (dairy, meat, vegetables, fruit and arable crops), production systems (conventional and organic) and different farm sizes and types, optimising the data analysis obtained across multiple farms. DEMETER will demonstrate the real-life potential of advanced standards-based interoperability between IoT technologies by adapting and extending existing standards into an over-arching Agricultural Information Model, concurrently ensuring security, privacy and business confidentiality across the full value chain in multiple agri-food operational environments. DEMETER will encompass a multi system and multi data source integration considering not only IoT but legacy systems, open data, geographical and satellite information, and in general will provide an open and interoperable data integration model. DEMETER displays how an integrated approach to business modelling and user acceptance can support sustainable farming and food production systems, provide safe food and support farmers in their decision-making in ‘doing more with less’. DEMETER will bring new business opportunities on the farm and in the wider agri-food economy, while concurrently contributing to the safeguarding of Europe’s precious natural resources. DEMETER’s goal is the creation of a secure and sustainable European IoT technology and business ecosystem whose impact could be transformative in the EC food and agriculture sector, and potentially across the world.