#Agricolus success story: RDA Korça and apple orchards support in Albania

The regional development agency (PMI) of Korça is a non-profit foundation born in 1998 with the aim to support the development of Korça region in Albania.
The Foundation has implemented several projects to support the development of the region, collaborating with local and central government institutions for their realization.

We contacted Agricolus to support farmers in the region of Korça, especially apple producers, for the management of about 200 hectares.

The collaboration started to meet the different needs expressed by farmers, such as improving apples quality, reducing management costs and the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides.
Another aim was to introduce young generation of farmers to the Agriculture 4.0 and support them in the crop scouting activities.

We heard of Agricolus through an Italian NGO, Tamat, with which we collaborate in several projects. Thanks to Tamat we presented AgriTech tools and Agricolus platform to young farmers.

We use the platform to monitor our 200 hectares of apple orchards by using vegetation indexes processed from satellite images. We than make crop scouting, based on those indexes, on specific areas where some issues have been reported.

Agricolus features are also used to schedule irrigation and fertilization in the fields. For each field we combine information related to the yield (yield maps are processed starting from accurate data collected in the field through Agricolus Farmer mobile App) with those related to the vegetation indexes in order to choose the correct dose of fertilizer and the most deficit areas.

We are very satisfied with the achieved results up to now. We are trying to encourage our young farmer to use the platform even more.

We recommend Agricolus to all farmers, agronomists and state institutions as it allows to efficiently manage crop operations and main activities even in small farms.

Furthermore, we recommend it to research institutes and Universities. These technologies are a valid decision support tool and will be the basis of the agriculture of the future.