Ninety years ago the world population was 2 billion, today, we have reached 7.6 billion. In 2050, the UN estimates that we will reach almost 10 billion people. It is easy to imagine how, from now on, we need to take care of how to provide, in a sustainable way, the food needs of such a vast and constantly growing population.

The agri-food sector suffers from over-use of natural resources that will not be able to meet the growing demand. New techniques and technologies are already being tested for some time and, if implemented correctly, they will be able to achieve sustainable food production, such as precision farming, for example.

The Interreg TAGs project (Technological and business innovation services to stimulate the local Agro-food ecosystems and to support a cross border collaboration among local action groups) aims to facilitate the transfer of technical and scientific innovations from research centres to farmers.

Thanks to the innovation of tools and services with high technological potential, in fact, the farmer will be able to optimize the potential of his company, intervening only where and when it is really necessary to intervene, thus avoiding unnecessary expenses and ensuring environmental sustainability for the territory.

The Partners of the TAGs project will develop processes, solutions, technologies and best practices with a view to optimizing the available resources. The ideas generated in this way will be tested and experimented in two pilot sites, one in Italy and one in Greece, in order to ensure the real effectiveness of the proposed results.

Finally, the results achieved will be shared at cross-border level through the creation of a Cross Border cluster composed of companies in the agri-food sector, research centres, Local Action Groups and administrations belonging to both Italian and Greek realities, in order to create a real innovation promotion network in support of all territorial realities.

Among the innovative solutions experimented by the TAGs Project are

• Remote sensing systems to obtain information on the state of health of crops;
• Systems for the detection of pathogens, water shortage stress and nutrition;
• Systems for the prediction of agricultural quality and production;
• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis for better environmental impact assessment;
• Assistance and support services for disease control, irrigation needs and fertilizer management.

Services offered to farms include

• Creation of a Cross Border Cluster;
• Business and Marketing Services, to quantify the actual economic benefits based on the different methods of precision farming in terms of investments, direct and indirect costs and labour;
• Internationalization Services.

ITALIAN PILOT SITE

The LAG Land of Trulli and Barsento has identified in its territory of competence the site suitable for the best achievement of the project results. It was thus identified a company that would fully meet the needs proposed by the project TAGs, specializing in the cultivation of apricots and more precisely in the cultivation of three different varieties: Faralia, Farbaly, Farlis.

The company has water collection and storage tanks in the company’s center that act as a stable and continuous lung of water for irrigation use, there is also installed a latest generation weather station equipped with a GSM card that can send data to a smartphone device, relating to atmospheric humidity, soil and area temperatures, wind speed, the mm of water evaporated or fallen due to precipitation, the detection of % humidity on the leaves, the dew point all recorded throughout the day. This station has already been set up to interface with other sensors provided for in the TAGs project, which will be installed in the pilot field.

GREEK PILOT SITE

The University of Patras has identified in its territory of competence the suitable site for the best achievement of the project results. The area in question is the lake area of Agoulinitsa, an area currently drained and covered by a large agricultural and forest area. Before the drainage, the coastal area of the Agoulinitsa lake was covered by a sand dune and vegetation strongly used to settle on saline soil. Salinity is in fact one of the characteristic factors of this pilot site and, at the same time, one of the greatest reasons for soil degradation in this area.

The strong salinity of the soil allows an improvement in the taste of the tomato (by increasing sugar and acid levels) but decreasing its shelf life and the incidence of late flowering rot. It was therefore decided to take advantage of the added value of tomato cultivation, also taking into account the presence in the area of two large local industries engaged in the production and sale of both tomato juice and other products based on this product. With regard to the tests foreseen by the project, this field will allow to study and analyse the effectiveness of agro-electromagnetic induction methods.