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DEMETER

DEMETER’s goal is to lead the digital transformation of Europe’s agri-food sector through the rapid adoption of advanced IoT technologies, data science and smart farming, ensuring its long-term viability and sustainability.

The DEMETER project is a large-scale deployment of farmer-centric, interoperable, smart farming-IoT based platforms delivered through a series of 20 pilots across 18 countries.

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    Funding

    H2020. Grant Agreetment 857202

    Duration

    4 years

    Vertical alignment / Department

    Agri Tech / Mobile Ecosystem and Pervasive Sensing (MEPS)

    Project Website

    Overview

    DEMETER’s goal is to lead the digital transformation of Europe’s agri-food sector through the rapid adoption of advanced IoT technologies, data science and smart farming, ensuring its long-term viability and sustainability.

    The key objective of DEMETER is to empower farmers and farmer cooperatives to a) use their existing platforms and machinery to extract new knowledge to improve their decision making and b) ease the acquisition, evolution and updating of their platforms, machinery and sensors by focusing their investments where these are needed. In parallel, DEMETER aims to transform the technology ecosystem for agriculture by reinforcing and establishing agreed standards, an agreed common information model, an interoperability space combined with an online/physical networked ecosystem and a set of interoperability components which will make the use of IoT technology effective and easy. This is achieved by a combination of human and digital solutions including the DEMETER Stakeholders Open Collaboration Space (SOCS) which is an online platform dedicated to all stakeholders (farmers, advisors, and technology suppliers) where they can collaborate, share best practices and participate in the co-creation processes.

    Implementation

    In DEMETER, the  project activities are deployed by means of seven core work packages, for inter-related areas, selected to cover areas of major significance to the agriculture and food sector, and concurrently deliver multi-actor involvement. The areas have been chosen with two criteria in mind, first they represent major areas of activity for the agricultural and food sector as a whole, and secondly, they  show promise in terms of the applicability and utility of IoT systems (including data management and data analytics).

    Twenty pilot projects are running across 18 European countries and a wide spectrum of sub-sectors: arable crops, irrigated crops, fruit and vegetable production,  livestock (poultry, dairy, animal welfare) and the supply chain. The pilots are used to demonstrate and evaluate how innovations and extended capabilities benefit from the interoperability mechanisms. The pilots are also used to monitor the evolution of the maturity in the stakeholders involved.

    Key Objectives

    • Analyse, adopt, enhance existing (and if necessary, introduce new) Information Models in the agri-food sector easing data sharing and interoperability across multiple Internet of Things (IOT) and Farming Management Information Systems (FMIS) and associated technologies.
    • Build knowledge exchange mechanisms, delivering an interoperability space for the agri-food domain, presenting technologies and data from different vendors, ensuring their interoperability, and using (and enhancing) a core set of open standards (adopted across all agri-food deployments thereby) coupled with carefully-planned security and privacy protection mechanisms (also addressing business confidentiality).
    • Empower the farmer, as a prosumer, to gain control in the data-food-chain by identifying and demonstrating a series of new IoT-based, data-driven, business models for profit, collaboration and co-production for farmers and across the value chain, leading to disruptive new value creation models.
    • Establish a benchmarking mechanism for agriculture solutions and business, targeting end-goals in terms of productivity and sustainability performance of farms, services, technologies, and practices based on a set of key performance indicators that are relevant to the farming community.
    • Reverse the relationship with suppliers, through an innovative model in which suppliers are responsible for ensuring that a final solution is optimal to the farmer’s existing context and expressed needs.