Small farms of below two hectares of farmland make up the vast majority of the EU's 10 million farms. Small-scale farming is therefore often touted as a route to more sustainable and secure food systems. Also regularly touted is that technological solutions hold great potential to boost the economic and environmental performance of the agricultural sector. Small farms, however, can struggle to both afford and use these digital solutions.
Enter Farmtopia – an initiative aiming to make digital farming, specifically Agricultural Digital Solutions (ADSs), more accessible and cost-effective for small-scale farmers.
Part of Horizon Europe, the EU's key funding programme for research and innovation with a budget of €95.5 billion, the three-year project running from September 2023 to August 2026, aims to provide access and training to ADSs to over 64,000 small farms.
“Digital farming solutions keep expanding,” explained a project’s coordinator, Dionysios Solomos. “These days, you have hardware such as weather stations, and proximate sensors that monitor factors such as soil qualities and plant growth. Agricultural robotics are advancing in weeding, fruit picking, and livestock monitoring. The Earth Observation (EO) Copernicus infrastructure qualifies as hardware that offers data. Then, we have software tools and platforms - Farm Management Information Systems (FMISs) and smartphone apps with data services useful in a multitude of agricultural operations.”
The adoption conundrum
But these advances may be in vain, he lamented, and may never reach the critical target group for whom they would prove most effective. “Small farmers are wary of adopting digital farming mainly because of the high cost of these solutions and the fact that these small farmers are mostly not digitally literate enough to use the digital solutions and interpret the information they offer. And, even when there is low-cost agricultural machinery available, it is often of limited capabilities.”
Another critical issue is the low interoperability and reusability between ADSs. Tech providers aren’t currently developing reusable software modules, complained Solomos, which is further hindering the adoption of digital farming practices.
Futureproofing competitiveness and income
But these technological solutions hold potential to boost the economic and environmental performance of the agricultural sector, he stressed. “Agriculture is a key sector in the European economic and environmental ecosystem, also acknowledged as a key contributor/driving force for the EU to meet its environmental and climate goals,” he told us. “Agriculture holds both the potential and responsibility to make a substantial impact in that regard, and this can only be actualized by leveraging the multiple possibilities new agricultural digital solutions offer in improving operational efficiency. Essentially, Agricultural Digital Solutions (ADSs), grounded in advanced technologies, enable data-driven decision-making, leading to enhanced sustainability, competitiveness, increased income, and an improved quality of life for small farmers.”
The Farmtopia initiative has so far selected nine pilot farms across Europe where digital solutions will be tested and, it is hoped, deployed and routinely adopted. Each farm will receive around €100,000 in funds. The plan is to soon add nine more farms to the pilot scheme. A total of €900,000 will be distributed.
To ensure the maximum efficiency of digital solutions, Farmtopia will engage both farmers and ADSs providers in a cooperative deployment approach that reflects actual needs and challenges.
The collaborative approach will bring together a diverse spectrum of stakeholders spanning the entire agricultural value chain, including farmers, ADS providers, farm advisors, scientists, policy makers, AKIS (Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems) specialists.
Solomos hopes the pilot farms will develop cost-effective ADSs that can support small farms in boosting economic and environmental performance. These farmers need “a resilient, productive, and climate-neutral farming system that offers low-cost, interoperable, and reusable ADSs – from hardware, and software, to data”, he stressed. These solutions are based on technologies such as Earth Observation infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, sensor network and Artificial Intelligence.
The pilot farms will also develop reusable software modules, business and governance models, and scalable infrastructure for ADSs, which it is hoped will reduce costs for both farmers and ADS providers.
Developing sustainable business models
Farmtopia is not restricted to nor does it favour a specific crop or growing model. The pilot farms are a mix organic and conventional and located in France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Slovenia, Romania and Ukraine. The crops they are growing include organic avocado, arable crops, industrial hemp, carrots, maize, wheat and grapes. “We also have farms involved in mushroom production, dairy sheep, cows, and goats,” Solomos said.
“Farmtopia has strategically planned to engage farms with diverse, heterogeneous characteristics in SIP implementation to foster ADSs’ deployment and validation in diverse contexts and conditions, thus ensuring wide ADSs’ applicability and scale-out. Overall, Farmtopia will develop a wide array of digital solutions, covering 8 types of crops and livestock of significant regional importance. These solutions will be deployed and validated across 53 diverse farm conditions, encompassing various growing models (monocultural, mixed, or rotational) and farming practices.”
Going beyond a ‘technology push’
One of the core principles that Farmtopia builds upon is that a simple ‘technology push’ is insufficient for progress, Solomos added. “Technology needs to solve real problems and be combined with appropriate changes in business models and the way the different actors of the agri-food value chain work and cooperate,” he said.
“Unlike most of the available digital solutions which are driven by top-down, profit-oriented models for large-scale agriculture and are often associated with significant investment and maintenance costs, Farmtopia pioneers a bottom-up, farmer-driven approach that fosters the co-creation of cost-effective ADSs, specifically designed to address the distinctive needs and attributes of small-scale farms.”
As well as deployment of customisable digital solutions for small farms, the project will extend to the introduction of a range of innovative business models (e.g., pay-as-you-go, performance-based, etc.). These can render ADSs’ adoption particularly affordable, Solomos said, whilst securing financial viability and long-standing value for adopters. It is further hoped cost reduction can also be achieved through the release of reusable, open-source software modules that can be used by tech providers to either improve their existing offerings or develop new ADSs.
“These modules, fully adhering to interoperability standards, entail substantially lower development costs as they ensure a maximum degree of exploitation of existing available data/services.”
Farmtopia says it will pursue strategic partnerships with influential industry players and policymakers to support framework enhancements in ADSs governance – mostly pertaining to public infrastructure accessibility, data sharing, and ownership issues – that are anticipated to result in further cost reductions for the deployment and adoption of ADSs over time.
To further assist the widespread roll out of digital solutions, the project plans to provide the European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) community and the French CUMA (Coopérative d'Utilisation de Matériel Agricole) community with the Farmtopia solutions and services.
“Thanks to a vast network of small farmers involved in the communities, over 64,000 farmers will have access to ADS, training, and the ADS sharing platform by the end of the project and certainly after the 18 SIPs have been validated,” explained Solomos. The Farmtopia team comprises leading universities, industry representatives, SMEs, startups, farmer associations, consultancy companies, and more, all collaborating to contribute to this goal, he stressed.
“The team is from a vast European network, with organisations coming from Greece, Ireland, France, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Netherlands, Serbia, Hungary, Romania, and Lithuania… Farmtopia aims to democratise digital farming, ensuring accessibility for everyone.”
