After 2 years and half of hard work, the Smart-AKIS project closed with a successful half-day Final Conference organized on the 27th of June in Brussels: more than 100 people participated, including DG AGRI officials, agricultural practitioners, researchers and industry leaders. All of them with a common interest: how to foster the adoption of Smart Farming in Europe.
CEMA, together with the Agricultural University of Athens (AUA, the project leader) and Iniciativas Innovadoras(responsible for dissemination) organized the Conference that was held in the Representation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia to the European Union, in Brussels.
Ivo Hostens, CEMA Technical Director, and Prof. Spyros Fountas (AUA) opened the Conference, then moderated by Thanos Balafoutis from CERTH-iBO.
Leon Noordam, from Novifarm, presented a real-life application of smart farming and provided the audience with the concrete and inspirational experience from Dutch innovative farms.
This was the perfect introduction for the following topic of the event: the presentation of the Smart-AKIS results. The different Smart-AKIS Work Packages leaders had thereby the opportunity to present their main activities and achievements: Koen van Boheemen (WP1 - Wageningen University & Research), Maria Kernecker (WP2 - Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research-ZALF), Samy Ait-Amar (WP3 - ACTA) together with David Tinker (UK hub leader - David Tinker & Associates – EurAgEng), Milica Trajkovic (WP4 - BioSense Institute) and Ion Gorriti (WP5 - Iniciativas Innovadoras).
The Conference was also the occasion for the launch of the policy recommendations drawn by Smart-AKIS on three domains:
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Enhancing innovation-driven agricultural research within the EIP-AGRI ecosystem.
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Future research in Smart Farming.
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Mainstreaming Smart Farming.
The complete document with the recommendations will be available in the coming 2 months on the Smart-AKIS website.
Louis Mahy from EC’s DG AGRI then provided an overview of the current state of play of the EC support to Digitalization of Agriculture and Smart Farming adoption, with a specific focus on upcoming calls from Horizon 2020 and the new Common Agricultural Policy proposal.
As a means to illustrate some of the good practices identified during Smart-AKIS, aligned with the recommendations presented, Sara Djelveh (CEMA Research Officer) moderated a Multi-Actor Panel, where different Smart Farming initiatives were presented: Digital Agriculture – DLG Position Paper, API-AGRO & DigiFermes initiatives, the AgroSens Digital Agriculture of Serbia initiative, the S3 Agri-Food Platform on ‘High Tech Farming’, and last but not least the EU Code of Conduct on Agricultural Data Sharing by Contractual Agreement, presented by Vik Vandecaveye, CEMA Chairman of Digital Farming Project Team and responsible for connectivity at CNH Industrial.
Finally, the Policy Panel was moderated by Grigoris Chatzikostas from BioSense Institute, with the aim of getting feedback to the Smart-AKIS Recommendations from highly qualified individuals and experts from the research, industry, advisory services and policy-making fields, represented by: Louis Mahy, (EC DG AGRI), Krijn Poppe (Wageningen University & Research), Tom Kelly (Teagasc) and Klaus-Herbert Rolf (365Farmnet).
The Conference was closed by Spyros Fountas with the very important message that in spite of the project’s end in August, the Smart-AKIS website and Smart Farming Platform will remain operative for the upcoming years thanks to the commitment of the partnership.
Attendants also had the chance to tour the Smart Agriculture Village, an informal and networking forum where audio-visual materials, posters dissemination materials and representatives from Smart AKIS and other EU projects initiatives on the Smart Agriculture field: IoF2020, 4D4F, NEFERTITI, DataBio, AgroCycle, INNOSETA, GATES, and S3 Agri-Food on ‘High Tech Farming’.
All presentations from the Conference are available on the Smart-AKIS website.