This agronomic solution achieves significant savings in plant protection products, fertilizers, water, fuel and electricity thanks to image processing on the fields.
The Life-AIs consortium has received the support of the prestigious European Union’s LIFE environmental programme. This consortium brings together two prominent technology providers, Fede -project leader- and Agerpix, along with three major producers: Castillo de Canena, Dominio Fournier, a winery belonging to the González Byass Wine Family and Agrosao, from the Reyes Gutiérrez and Eurosemillas groups.
AIs is an innovative and comprehensive agronomic solution based on vision and artificial intelligence (AI) that helps farmers and agricultural companies to carry out the work on the fields with greater precision and to make decisions based on updated data coming from the visual information of their crops.
In the Life-AIs project, Fede, a technological leader in sprayers and digital agronomic solutions within the high-value crops sector, joins forces with Agerpix, a provider of digital agronomic services specialized in data processing and predictive models, to “see” crops by capturing images with 3D cameras and processing them with AI. The accuracy of the data generated from the valuable visual information allows controlling the status of the plantations and carrying out high-precision treatments and tasks on the fields.
Life-AIs: See & Save allows to know the vigor of the plantation, obtain forecast of the harvest and detect diseases. All this valuable information facilitates high-precision management of the plantation based on visual information with an excellent degree of detail and temporal resolution that will translate into significant environmental and economic benefits for agricultural companies.
It is estimated that, during the 54-month duration of the project, Life-AIs will achieve a reduction of 604 tons of greenhouse gases. This figure will multiply to reach a decrease of 3.225 tons per year when the technology is implemented in 97.437 hectares approximately. These reductions translate into savings of up to 43% in plant protection products, up to 20% in fertilizers, up to 31% in fuel and up to 13% in electricity annually. These environmental achievements show the total correspondence of Life-AIs with the objectives set by the strategy “From Farm to Fork” of the EU’s Green Deal.
Tests in vineyard, olive groves and avocados fields
The Life-AIs consortium will demonstrate the reduction of emissions and savings of this innovation in vineyard, olive groves and avocado plantations in Spain and Portugal. With this purpose, trials will be carried out on 150 hectares of crops belonging to the plantations of Dominio Fournier (D.O. Ribera del Duero vineyard, Spain), Castillo de Canena (olive grove, Spain) and Agrosao (avocado, Portugal).
The Life-AIs trials, which will be carried out thanks to the support of the LIFE programme, will confirm how this digital agronomic solution significantly reduces the environmental impact of agriculture in the high-value crop sector, taking care of quality fruit production, increasing farmer’s profitability and helping to improve the society’s food security.
With the contribution of the European Union’s LIFE Programme, the EU’s funding instrument for the environment and climate action, under grant agreement Project 101074540 — LIFE21-ENV-ES-Life-AIs.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.