OPENagri – Democratising digital farming through tailored open source and open hardware solutions

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest and investment in the use of Agricultural Digital Solutions (ADS). The use of ADS is seen by many as an opportunity to improve the economic and environmental performance of systems in the agricultural sector.

Despite tremendous efforts and resources spent, the use of ADS by farmers in the EU has been limited for reasons that include:

• the often excessive cost of the ADS,
• low farmer confidence in the ADS and data sharing, diversity reasons ,
• poor network connectivity problems faced by farms in remote areas, which affects ADS performance.

The overall goal of the OpenAgri project is to democratise digital agriculture by enabling its development and deployment of innovative, cost-effective, energy-efficient operating system software and open, hardware-based ADS systems that can operate with high performance efficiency even in remote areas with poor connectivity.This will be achieved by:

• ensuring ADS co-creation by involving farmers and farm advisors in participatory prototyping activities inspired by the makerspaces approach;
• providing access to a range of reusable OS software services designed to support edge and mixed-mode computing and “social engineering infrastructure”.

Project Partners:

• Maastricht University
• Agricultural University of Athens
• Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (EV ILVO)
• Foodscale Hub
• P2P Lab – Research Organization for the Commons and Peer to Peer Practices
• SCiO IKE
• Green Supply Chain Digital Innovation Hub, Greece
• Stichting Green Supply Chain Digital Innovation Hub, The Netherlands
• VizLore Labs Foundation
• Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center
• Łukasiewicz – Poznań Institute of Technology
• ISP -Innovatiesteunpunt voor Landbouw en Platteland, Belgium
• Institut de l’Elevage
• Centre D’innovation Et De Recherche De La Ferme Des Bouviers
• SK EMBIO Diagnostics, Ltd.
• Eden Library, EDENCORE Technologies IKE
• Wielkopolski Ośrodek Doradztwa Rolniczego/Wielkopolska Agricultural Advisory Centre in Poznań