The future of agriculture in Europe: Smart Farming leads the way: Smart-AKIS held the final conference in Brussels

 

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After more than 2 years of work, the EU Smart-AKIS Network invited stakeholders, researchers, advisers, politicians and representatives from the European Commission to its final conference presenting main findings on the adoption of Smart Farming Technologies in European agriculture. The conference took place in Brussels on June the 27th.

After more than 2 years of work, the EU Smart-AKIS Network invited stakeholders, researchers, advisers, politicians and representatives from the European Commission to its final conference presenting main findings on the adoption of Smart Farming Technologies in European agriculture.

The conference took place in Brussels on June the 27th. The conference highlighted the main achievements from 30 months of work. The programme was built around the following topics:

• Testimonials on the use of Smart Farming Technologies in Europe,
• Best practices on how farmers, research, industry and advisors engaged in innovative farming processes and
• Recommendations and Policy Briefs resulting from the analytical and reflection processes carried out during the project.

Maria Kernecker from ZALF presented the highlights of the social research about farmers' perception and needs and multi-actor innovation processes. Advisors and associations are key actors in the innovation case studies that were studied. Findings and recommendations from the study will be available shortly with #aginnovation #DigitalFarming

Leon Noordam from Novifarm, a cooperation of 6 family farms in the Netherlands, gave an inspiring talk on how Smart Farming helps the farmers to better pay attention to plants and soil conditions instead of focusing on tractor control, thereby farming more precisely. Milica Trajkovic from BioSense (Serbia) presented the Smart Farming Platform with a searchable database of SmartFarming technologies. Please test it yourself: https://smart-akis.com/SFCPPortal/#/app-h/registration

Louis Mahy from DG Agri gave an overview of digital farming within the context of the EU policy landscape. He welcomed the Smart AKIS recommendations as supporting considerations at policy levels and emphasised the need for future studies in this field.

A policy panel on #smartfarming with several high profile experts including Krijn R Poppe, Luis Mahy, Tom Kelly and Klaus-Herbert Rolf and facilitated by Grigorious Chatzikakis drew attention to favourable market conditions, ethical concerns and questions of property rights, training and education needs and again, farmers’ perspectives and interests in smart farming technologies. Finally, Spyros Fountas, the project coordinator from Athens Agricultural University strengthened the widely shared insight that “smart farming technologies are tools and not an end”.

Press release as PDF file

Further informations:

• More about Smart AKIS

Pictures

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