Sustainable Innovation Pilot 5

Smart Farming on rural farms demonstrating its benefit in the wider agri-food community and co-creating new food products and services - Ireland

Farming is the mainstay of rural areas, as employment in and income form this sector directly benefits the locality. The integration of farming enterprises with related value chains, such as agri-tourism or food tourism would have positive cumulative effects.

Challenge: Embedding information generated from use of on-farm sensors into diverse value chains to support
collaboration among the actors and the creation of new joint products and enhance sustainability performance.

Sustainable innovation pilots activities:

From a variety of commercially available sensors, a subset will be tested on 6 Ambassador farms, so that ‘real-time data’ can be collected, analysed and used to develop models and effective decision support tools for farmers. A toolkit of robust, reliable and verified sensors is envisaged, together with the most appropriate local Smart Farming solutions, and this toolkit will be rolled out to a larger farmer group. This toolkit will support farmers in optimizing their businesses, in proving the sustainability/low environmental impact, and consequently support a high market value for their produce. Furthermore, the data will be used to support new food and food tourism products and services with evidence-based credence attributes, which will be co-created with the local actors (through Enterprise Ireland). A brand for the Dingle Peninsula will be built to secure the region as a destination of choice, supported by data proving low food miles and low carbon footprints.