#Agricolus success story: Fondazione per l’Istruzione Agraria

Fondazione per l’Istruzione Agraria is run under an integrated farming regime, which requires compliance with regional cultivation specifications. The most important tree crops include olives on about 50 hectares, vines for another 50 hectares and hazelnuts, with a planted area of 50 hectares and a plan to expand to about 90 hectares

Most of the fields are planted with arable crops such as soft wheat, durum wheat, barley, lentils, beans, spelt, grain and fodder maize, fresh peas for the freezing industry, and vegetables such as tomatoes, melon, courgette, cabbage and spinach.

In addition to field cultivation, the farm also carries out nursery activities for the production and distribution of hazelnut seedlings of the Tonda Francescana^® variety, patented by the University of Perugia, and other classic varieties of the Italian hazelnut industry.

Alongside all these dynamics is the zootechnical activity with the management of a beef stable with Chianina breed.

Due to the farm size, the needs were to have a system that would simplify the stages of monitoring the state of health of the crops, organize and coordinate the management of the farm, collect and integrate all the data coming from the field (and not only), in the perspective of carrying out interventions focused on the needs of the individual crops.

We got to know Agricolus on a context of initiatives to get knowledge of the territorial context and operators working within it.

The platform is mainly used for crop monitoring thanks to the possibility to have, twice a week, satellite maps of individual fields with various indices useful for analysing the state of health, such as vigour and water status.

Another feature of Agricolus is to collect and display all data detected by the many sensors present on the farm, such as weather stations and soil humidity sensors.

Data and alerts derived from integrated decision support systems are very useful.

We also use it to register all the crop operations that have taken place in the fields, so that we can create a history of all the crops and interventions that have been carried out over time.

Agricolus is a well-structured system, very easy to use and intuitive, even for those approaching this type of software for the first time

Being a web platform, it does not require any major hardware tools, only a connection to internet and it is accessible everywhere, both in the office and in the field.

It is a constantly evolving tool and each update brings improvements to existing systems and introduces new features.

A very positive note is the efficiency of the helpdesk which, once a problem or difficulty in using the platform is reported, is able to give exhaustive answers within a few minutes.