PRECIMED - Precision Irrigation Management to Improve Water and Nutrient Use Efficiency in theMediterranean Region

Mediterranean countries have done important effort to modernize the irrigation systems; however more research and technology transfer is needed. There are important results associated with tools estimating plant water and saline stress levels and their impact on productivity, there is also a lot of knowledge related to the effects of deficit irrigation strategies and uses of non-conventional water sources (frequently with high level of salts) on the water irrigation use efficiency. However, most of this knowledge remains at research level and there is now the need to boost the exploitation of such knowledge by end-users. The integration of all this knowledge in one unique precision irrigation system is necessary in order to introduce an actual modification in the Mediterranean agriculture production approach. There are solutions available on the market covering a range of individual operations in the agriculture sector to optimise irrigation, tree pruning, pest management etc. On their own, these solutions are providing value to farmers, either by enabling reduction of costs or more efficient execution of targeted operations. However, most of these solutions are built around propietary protocol and are the so-called point solution, i.e. addressing a single farm operation and implemented as an isolated solution, despite using modern cloud-based technologies as the IoT concept. The main consequence of this situation on the market is that a single farm must use multiple solutions. The Decision Support System (DSS) that we propose, will alleviate these problems by validating the real-life potential and market readiness of advanced interoperability between agricultural devices, for different production sectors like the greenhouses and outdoor crops.

PRECIMED will demonstrate the real-life potential of advanced interoperability between IoT technologies across the full value chain in multiple agri-food operational environments, involving different production sectors (vegetables, fruit and arable crops), production systems (conventional and organic) and different farm sizes. PRECIMED displays how an integrated approach of business, behaviour and technology in IoT can support sustainable farming and food production systems, provide safe food, improve farm’s efficiency by supporting farmers in their decision-making; in ‘doing more with less’. More specifically, PRECIMED will empower the farmer as a prosumer* to gain control in the data-food-chain and foster development and adoption of IoT-based services that provide further opportunities, including new business models on the farm and in the wider agri-food economy, while concurrently contributing to the safeguarding of the Mediterranean precious natural resources. *A prosumer combines the words ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’. The term reflects how traditional end users in a value chain no longer are only on the receiving (consuming) end, but also on the producing end. It is often used in the context of (renewable) energy for instance, as more and more households are now generating their own energy through solar panels or wind mills, thereby turning traditional market models upside down. In the IoT domain, a prosumer farmer is not only managing an important data source, but can position himself or herself as supplier in a data-driven business model rather than being a mere end consumer of (data) products and services. Also, the farmer can become more empowered to optimally run his or her business and daily life, through informed decision-making and improved well-being.

PRECIMED will follow a scientific approach based on experimental results to describe the operation of the framework and their analysis to get, on the one hand, feedback to improve the designed solutions and on the other hand to publish and disseminate the evaluation results and also disseminate and discuss the lessons learned and best practices based on the gained experience. The activities to be carried out during the project have been carefully designed to achieve the project goals and most importantly, to deliver maximum socioeconomic impact, transfer of knowledge and deal with challenges in the water sector. The main expected impacts of PRECIMED contributions to the topic are: - Improving on-farm water use efficiency while maintaining crop productivity, quality and safety, and soil fertility. - Upscaling the on-farm water use efficiency gain to the irrigation district level. - To demonstrate irrigation scheduling models and tools to be developed in collaboration with private companies, mainly SMEs. - To determine irrigation protocols tailored to low-quality water availability and to new climate-proof crops with reduced water requirements. - To reduce contamination of aquifers, mainly by nitrates, thanks to the improved fertirrigation scheduling protocols.