The SmartAgriHubs project is coming to an end on 1st November 2022. After 4 years, the project will be celebrating its community and its legacy in a 3-day conference from 26 to 28 September in Lisbon, Portugal. The event will gather partners, experts, and members of the European institutions to discuss the results of the project and its perspective.
SmartAgriHubs is a €20 M EU project under the Horizon 2020 instrument, and brings together a consortium of well over 164 partners in the European agri-food sector. The project aims to realize the digitization of European agriculture by fostering an agricultural innovation ecosystem dedicated to excellence, sustainability and success. By connecting and fostering European agricultural and IT innovation SmartAgriHubs extends digital solutions into the agri-food sector and helps farmers and their businesses to achieve real and attainable results. In the last 4 years, SmartAgriHubs did not only build a self-sustaining network but also developed unique tools. The Innovation Portal lies at the heart of the SmartAgriHubs community, gathering more than 800 organizations and 3500 users.
The 4 years of the project reflect the changing landscape of European agriculture. For example, the first SmartAgriHubs Open Call was launched during the first wave of the pandemic on 12 May 2020, and aimed at mitigating its effects on our food systems. At the start of the Ukrainian war, SmartAgriHubs launched a call for support to its community, connecting with its partners in Ukraine. Now more than ever, we need to foster meaningful innovation which can support our food systems.
The essence of SmartAgriHubs is to connect the dots by collaborating closely with 15 European projects. This is why its Final Event will not only be dedicated to its community, but also to the organizations and partners that will continue to support its work. The event will be dedicated to enhancing collaboration among European innovators and exchange on the digitalisation of European agriculture. The Final Event will feature an “Agri-tech Marketplace”, where European projects, Digital Innovation, start-ups, universitie etc will be able to present their work and connect.
DEMETER is running two separate workshops. The first on ‘Semantic Interoperability and Data Sharing’ will run on 27th September from 11.15-12.30pm. The latest advances in technologies like IoT, AI and Big Data, among others, have boosted the adoption of smart farming practices that emphasize the use of ICT in the farm management cycle to exploit the available data. This, however, has led to an explosion of data availability that brings new challenges to be addressed. Data is usually available in different sources, in different formats, and represented according to different models, thereby hampering data interoperability and integration. This workshop addressed will include the definition of common vocabularies, data spaces, standard APIs, and others.
The second DEMETER workshop will run on 28th September from 15-16.00pm and will address ‘Women in Agriculture’ following on from the work done in association with SmartAgriHubs and their gender task force. Some of the DEMETER pilot projects will also participate in the Marketplace exhibition.
Click here to access the programme and more information about the event
Taking stock of the ongoing discussions on food prices, sustainable agriculture and technology, the last 2 days of the event are open to the general public (registration required). Interested journalists will be provided with media access and interview opportunities.
