Agri Digital Growth, new talents for precision agriculture
The European project for the development of skills in agriculture and digital mechanisation is starting. The initiative, which involves CREA, FederUnacoma and partners from other Central European countries, aims to provide theoretical and practical training for optimal use of digital technologies applied to agricultural mechanisation. In-depth sessions and dissemination of the project's contents are planned at EIMA 2024
The new project in which FederUnacoma is taking part is called Agri Digital Growth, in an initiative financed by the Interreg Central Europe program. Two and a half years of work, during which, together with other partners from Central European countries, the Italian mechanisation industry will work on identifying the critical profiles emerging in the sector, and on creating training courses that can at least partially fill the demand for increasingly in-depth skills, especially in digital and electronic components.
"We have been insisting on the topic of training for years now," says Alessio Bolognesi, digital area manager at the Bologna office, "because both agricultural practices and machinery have become decidedly more sophisticated than twenty or thirty years ago, embracing the principles of precision agriculture that allow for more targeted interventions in the various phases of cultivation and processing or transformation of products." “Agricultural business management systems are increasingly digital – explains Bolognesi – and now extend to important phases of processing, well beyond the aspects of economic or accounting management. In short, even in agriculture we have to deal with a lot of data: agronomic, on product volumes and quality, meteorological, on energy, on the functioning of machinery and so on and so forth. Faced with this evolution, we must urgently adapt the access of current and future operators to training that meets the needs of both machinery and systems manufacturing companies and agricultural companies."
The project, which started in June and is coordinated by Luca Masiero of CREA Viticoltura Enologia (Council for Agricultural Research - Viticulture and Enology) in Conegliano, will propose the development of training courses on specific topics, aimed at both young specialists and individuals already in the workforce. The selected areas are digital security (cybersecurity), mechatronics, IOT (Internet of Things), data management, cloud and edge computing and the exploitation of satellite services for agriculture.
"We try to respond to what we perceive as the needs of our companies," explains the Federation of Builders, "and we have conducted several surveys among our members to identify the areas in which it has become more difficult to ensure the right supply of skills, and the response has guided us towards the choice of specific themes." In practical terms, this means that the project will develop agile courses and training tools, calibrated to the needs of those who already have basic knowledge and taking into account that some of the students will also be professionally engaged. The Agri Digital Growth project fits coherently into a long-term vision embraced by the Federation, which looks to comprehensive support for training in the sector, with particular reference to the needs determined by the adoption of precision agriculture.
Together with institutional bodies and university structures, FederUnacoma is developing a very ambitious collaboration program, called AFI Accademia, to provide associated companies, and also external interlocutors, a well-defined framework for access to a training offer systematically aligned with the needs of companies. From this point of view, the Federation considers the Agri Digital Growth project a good test, also because it requires setting up training in a transnational perspective, collaborating with the other project partners.
A total of 11 partners are participating in Agri Digital Growth, including the Universities of Maribor in Slovenia, Zagreb and Budapest with institutes specialising in viticulture, two Austrian research centres, the Josephinum, with agronomic expertise, which will collaborate with the LCM (Linz Center of Mechatronics). And also Plan4All, a leading association in the sector of satellite technologies applied to agriculture, based in the Czech Republic, ARSSA, the development agency of the Polish region of Bielsko-Biała, EIT Digital, part of the European Institute of Technology and the Fenice Foundation of Padua, which acts as a link between the project and the dimension of regional training policies. “This is an important aspect – recalls Marcello Mongiardo, project manager of the project – to ensure that regional governments respond at a systemic level to the challenge of acquiring skills and resources for businesses. In Italy, professional training is the responsibility of the regions and for this reason two of the most representative regions in the sector, Veneto and Emilia Romagna, are associated with the project”.
Agri Digital Growth will be present at the next edition of EIMA, from 6 to 10 November. It will be an opportunity to publicly launch the project, with a session on the development of regional ecosystems for precision agriculture scheduled for Thursday, November 7, and with the announcement, the following day, of the first Call for Talent, a competition for precision agriculture specialists, who will have to respond to concrete challenges, formulated by the project partners, to generate innovative solutions, applicable to the reality of operations that farms regularly face. The project will last two and a half years, until the next edition of EIMA, in 2026.
