Taking solutions to the market is always a critical phase for businesses. More so, if we are talking about SMEs operating in a cross-border environment. Testing facilities projects are some of the instruments the EU is deploying to tackle the issue. In the farming sector, the Agrifood TEF project provides innovators with concrete opportunities to test potential solutions and challenge assumptions before deployment. “The logic behind the Agrifood TEF project – says Raffaele Giaffreda, Chief Innovation Scientist at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, Italy – is to provide technology companies with reliable access to in-field infrastructure to test their AI and Robotics solutions, before hitting the market”. Funded under the Digital Europe programme, the project revolves around 9 nodes in 9 different countries, including Italy, Austria and Poland.
“We have developed a large offer of services – continues Giaffreda – which responds to the needs of innovators in different subsectors of the agrifood industry, from viticulture to food processing and more, including also drone flight operations or solutions based on sensing technologies. In a way, we want to make technology and testing facilities more easily accessible to SMEs that are not as structured as the big players. We still see a major gap between big and small companies, for example when it comes to handling large quantities of data for AI training purposes, which in turn is a key factor to succeed in efficient precision agriculture. Furthermore, we see more and more solutions on crop monitoring, that assist farmers with additional capacity generated by sensing technologies, satellite data, or by the possibility of interpreting images through remote sensing with drones or small rovers. These technologies are still quite expensive for farmers, and I think we need make their impact clearer in terms of what benefits farming businesses obtain from them, be it savings, improvement of quality, or the optimisation of work-force”.
Testing facilities contribute to the vision of the EU, for instance to deploy Artificial Intelligence in real world. “Within this framework – adds Giaffreda – we collaborate with the EDIHs (European Digital Innovation Hubs), to help companies design new products, thanks to the scientific expertise and the result of research experiments. Solutions are tested, via the TEF in a real context. It’s a bit like a test before invest kind of approach, which should help minimise risk and increase potential for innovators. Products can be both physical or digital, for instance to test solutions that should work in an edge environment, like fruit or disease recognition, within the logic of sovereign data sharing; or to integrate technologies on machinery, assessing for instance the efficiency of intervention in test cultivations provided by the project, so as to calibrate treatments in the best possible way”.
Agrifood TEF has so far provided support to 175 unique clients, that is European start-ups. The website reports also details about some of these success stories. The project is now devoting efforts to operate beyond the geographical boundaries of its consortium, targeting for instance countries like Slovenia or Croatia. Aside from Italy through FBK, Politecnico Milano, Universities of Milan and Naples, CREA, the project is present in Austria with Josephinum Research, and in Poland, with Lukasiewicz Poznan Institute of Technology and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PSNC).
To know more, visit Agrifood TEF website.