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FFL-JA-Forskningsmidlene for jordbruk og matindustri

FILIMA – The smart farmers solution for more sustainable and effective Field Lifecycle Management

Alternative title: FILIMA - Bonde-smart system, for mer bærekraftig og effektiv feltlivssyklusstyring

Awarded: NOK 12.2 mill.

Project Number:

332390

Project Period:

2022 - 2025

Organisation:

Continuing to feed growing populations with the effects of climate change and with reduced access to new arable land constitutes a major global challenge and will require improved and more effective agricultural practices to produce more crops of higher quality on existing land. To succeed in this goal, new digital solutions are required to make it possible to monitor the conditions more precisely within a particular field and to combine this data with regenerative practices and experience-based knowledge to improve decision making for farming operations such as maintenance sowing and strategic fertilising. In this project we will focus on the development of new technologies for more efficient and sustainable production of fodder, which is crucial for grazing ruminants and comprises over 70% of all agricultural land in Norway. Today, livestock farmers have a limited opportunity to closely monitor their feed crop during the growth phase as it is too time-consuming work tasks. Furthermore, identifying signs of unwanted changes across different areas in the field at an early stage is very challenging without specialised technologies. Often these solutions are task-specific (e.g. optimising crop yield) and not designed to take into account the full field lifecycle, making it difficult for the farmer to make the best overall decisions. Other challenges are related to usability, systems from different vendors do not talk to each other. Agrosense in collaboration with SINTEF, NLR, and FKRA is developing a ground breaking solution that combines sensor systems and automated data capture platforms to improve the quality and resolution of data available to the farmer and to reduce time consuming work processes, as well as advanced analysis and decision support software to empower farmers to make smarter and more sustainable operational decisions and to unlock new revenue streams from carbon capture.

New agriculture technologies are needed to produce food more effectively for a growing world population. Precision agriculture methods are promising but can be challenging to implement due to the need for frequent collection of detailed crop data as well as challenges posed by a lot of proprietary equipment that cannot easily be adopted to existing machinery. Agrosense is building precision-agriculture technology to enable farmers to implement more effective regenerative farming techniques and to help justify the associated investments by realising untapped revenue streams for carbon capture. Four key innovations are required and will be developed in this project: • A capability for monitoring soil, crop, and local climatic conditions effectively. • Software models for complete field lifecycle, enabling optimisation for productivity and sustainability. • Automated data capture platforms to enable solutions to scale effectively with increasing farm size. • Methodology for developing new business models for farmer-centric technologies. Thus, new sensing strategies, measurement models, and data analytics that reflects farmers' and agronomists' know-how are needed. Agrosense is built on accumulated knowledge from three generations of farming entrepreneurship, with diverse agronomic and technological backgrounds and a farmer-centric vision. A collaboration with SINTEF, NLR, and FKRA will enable Agrosense to leverage world-leading expertise within sensor system development, drone technologies, machine learning and optimisation as well invaluable knowledge on field management paradigms to deliver an innovative, first-to-market solution that will enable Agrosense to carve a niche in the rapidly expanding European smart-agri market. The success of this project will help to position Norway at the forefront of smart tech for sustainable agriculture in Europe and by addressing UN sustainability goals 2, 8, and 15 will assist with the transition to a greener Norwegian economy.

Funding scheme:

FFL-JA-Forskningsmidlene for jordbruk og matindustri