AgroNIT: Innovating Precision Agriculture

Major global concerns considering food production include, not only meeting the increasing food demand but also meeting challenges that put significantly less strain on the environment, safeguard food quality and prevent wastage. To address the erstwhile challenges, the AgroNIT testbed has been designed to provide common access to facilities and services fostering the development and the validation through experimentation of novel cultivation practices, as well as to enable the digital transformation of Agriculture by applying advanced cultivation methods with digital tools and connected machinery. In this paper, we describe how AgroNIT brings emerging digital technologies to the disposal of farmers and scientists in order to advance agriculture practices in multi-fold dimensions: From improving production yield to minimizing the crops' environmental footprint and the effective management of fertilizers and pesticides to the optimization of the irrigation processes tailored to the needs of each crop cultivar. In AgroNIT smart decision support systems provide real-time AI-generated consultancy to farmers by relying on sensors that automate field measurements collection. Furthermore, agricultural scientists have access to a large repository of data measurements and novel data analytic services, being able to design, apply – along with the farmers – and validate new cultivation protocols. We provide examples demonstrating specific experiments and we show how the AgroNIT testbed benefits both farmers and agricultural scientists, thus enabling next-generation precision agriculture.