PENFA

PENFA – Pesticide Environmental Fate Analysis

CHALLENGE

The challenge of PENFA project is to support decision making on pesticide use among agricultural producers, through the identification of the plants’ response to environmental stress conditions that affect pesticide breakdown, by monitoring, measuring, and analysing abiotic and biotic parameters that play a significant role in the main growing phases. With the employed technology PENFA will focus on the pesticide residue break down and its relevancy with ambient microclimatic conditions, creating new knowledge, originated from farmers to farmers and promoting a knowledge exchange mechanism between farmers and suppliers regarding a crucial factor of primary production and optimal agricultural practices.

AIM

With PENFA (Pesticide Environmental Fate Analysis) the project aims to introduce an innovative approach for the growing challenge of safe primary production of greenhouse vegetables, and as a result, mitigate the public health risk. PENFA project aims to demonstrate a highly innovative and interoperable system that will be able to integrate data from the ambient environment of greenhouses with the diagnostic data derived from BELD (BioELecticDiagnostics) device, regarding pesticide residues in critical growth stages, to enable and empower growers to perform optimal pesticide use in the critical fragment of greenhouse horticulture.

HOW

The project will start with the installation of the three sensors integrated into the M2M cluster: AirBELD sensor will serve as a monitoring tool of the agriculture indoor (greenhouse) air quality parameters, WESS is an agricultural meteorological station that will help on gathering necessary data in regards of monitoring soil conditions, and finally BELD is a standardized sensor for pesticides residues detection. The PENFA solution will be built on by deep understanding of the state-of-the- art hardware sensing technologies with the necessary software modules that will provide to farmers and advisors, in a simple to use manner. Two main product/services that will be tailored are: Agri-environmental monitoring and insect presence prediction services tailored to greenhouse vegetable crops (e.g., tomatoes) and Applied pesticide residues break down estimation in relevancy with the micro-climatic conditions and specific critical plant growth stages.

BENEFIT

The project will involve around 200 farmers from Cyprus to train them on how to practice ‘smart farming technologies’ and digital data for optimization of their products and the content of pesticides. Food demand is growing rapidly and distributing healthy products according to the safety and quality standards is challenging more than ever. Therefore, the PENFA project will entirely focus on strengthening knowledge transfer mechanisms and delivering simplified knowledge and effective solution which each farmer can easily valorise in their production processes. Besides, PENFA will genuinely focus on bringing a positive impact on improving economic, innovative, and environmental features in the food-agriculture market, ensuring healthy products are delivered from the farm to the fork, eliminating food losses and lowering production risks, and cutting down supply costs.