Development goes fast. New keywords appear that promise to solve many problems in the production process, like big data, modeling and prediction technologies, machine learning, deep learning and blockchain. Yet, they rely on high quality and often massive amounts of data. And these technologies are implemented in different countries at different rates and in different places along the supply chain.

In the Vegetables Trial we help the agri-food sector to bridge the gap between the promise of data availability and all the practical challenges to achieve higher productivity. We develop and test IoT solutions for a variety of production systems, ranging from indoor and city farming to open-air farming. Our use cases integrate heterogeneous data sources, facing challenges related to the reliability and management/transmission of high volumes of data.

It is essential to provide error free and high quality data to the different algorithms (this is where the abovementioned keywords play a role). Only then, can these rough data result into useful information that reduces farmers’ workload and improves productivity. The solutions from our use cases are implemented as for example DSS (Decision Support Systems), Agricultural APPs and web-based systems or FMIS (Farm Management Information Systems).