You can also view the message online

EFITA

Châtenay-Malabry (FR - 92290), February 17, 2020

EFITA newsletter / 917 - European Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and the Environment

To unsubscribe this newsletter, please contact me directely: guy.waksman(a)laposte.net if this link Unsubscribe does not work.

Please note that I changed the presentation of the links that are embedded in the name of the web service.

page facebook

To correspond with me (GW), please use this address: guy.waksman(a)laposte.net


To subscribe the efita newsletter (please ask your friends and colleagues to test this link)
Efita Newsletters subscription


Weekly newsletters about ICT in Agriculture in English and French
Both newsletters have around 14000 subscribers.
>>> Last weekly EFITA Newsletters in English (created in 1999)
Efita Newsletters


>>> Last weekly AFIA Newsletters in French (created 20 years ago in 1997)
Afia Newsletters

Around 15% of subscribers have a look on these newsletters. A rather normal rate…
The archive for the last years are available on the AFIA web site.


To submit or not submit?

 



Archives of our newsletters in French and English
Voir Afia
Voir Efita


From ICT-AGRI

You are probably completing your pre-proposal or still searching for some partners. We received some feedback on our finding partner tool and want to improve it. The existing finding partner tool is based on the data from ICT-AGRI 1 and 2, which has already a lot of data but isn’t always up to date. So we created a new tool Offer of expertise. With this new tool, we aim to display offers of expertise from companies or researchers ready to join a project in the call. Data will be more updated and relevant to the topics of the call. We would, therefore, like to ask you to consider using this new tool as well.

To our call documents, we added a Checklist for applicants and coordinators for submission of pre-proposals. The purpose of the checklist is to provide you with an overview of things to think about when drafting and submitting a proposal, accompanied by a checkbox.

In the newsletter, you could already read that ICT-AGRI-FOOD is also reaching out to collaborate with International partners like New Zealand, Canada and the USA. We would definitely like to emphasise this because it could mean more value and potential impact for your project. Next to IBF countries, you can involve any other country in the call which is not a funder but researchers from these countries have to follow some rules which are described in the Call Announcement Document.

For further information on the new tool and IBF, please look into our website.

We wish you good success with your pre-proposal!

Contact: Marijke Hunninck - ILVO, Belgium
E-mail: marijke.hunninck(a)ilvo.vlaanderen.be


Brexit

 



Can farming make space for nature? By Sam Knight (a fairy tale: nobody here is discussing farmers’ revenues nor the risks related to the agricultural productions - GW)

After Brexit, the obsessions of Jake Fiennes could change how Britain uses its land.
See newyorker.com



Welcome to the"4 per 1000" Initiative

See 4p1000.org

 



The future as we saw it yesterday

Giant robot


The 2020s: could they usher in the age of a pro-science Europe, free from fears and chemophobia? By Jean-Paul Oury

In a season of resolutions, a site like ours has one hope: that the 2020s will be the decade of renewal for European scientific culture. To achieve this, there is only one model to follow: a love of knowledge and learning. In this respect, China seems to be showing us the way… but will we […] The post The 2020s: could they usher in the age of a pro-science Europe, free from fears and chemophobia?
See europeanscientist.com


Buildings made out of timber could become an important global carbon sink

Timber buildings could store anywhere between 10 million tonnes of carbon per year to 700 million tonnes, according to a new paper published on 27 January in Nature Sustainability.
See europeanscientist.com


Good old days (?????): The Hay Wagon, Montfoucault, by Camille Pissarro (1879)


Futuristic farming has arrived with weeding robots: meet Oz, Dino and Ted, by Andrew Amelinckx
See modernfarmer.comv


Agricultural robots’ market to be worth $ 20.6 Billion by 2025

Increasing affordability of IoT and GPS technologies is driving the growth of the market.
See futurefarming.com


Myriota connects remote farmers to nanosatellites

Australian company Myriota supplies remote farmers, who don’t have access to the internet, with low-cost connectivity solutions.
See futurefarming.com

The Efita newsletter is sponsored by:
page facebook

Autonomous robot to zap individual weeds

RootWave and Small Robot Company are developing a weed zapping autonomous robot. The robot is called ‘Dick’, and according to RootWave and Small Robot Company it’s the world’s first non-chemical precision robotic weeding for cereal crops.
See futurefarming.com


Fendt Momentum planter launched in North America

AGCO Corporation introduces the new Fendt Momentum planter to North American row crop producers. The Momentum has been designed to help overcome planting conditions that have historically challenged even emergence and resulted in less than optimum crop yields.
See futurefarming.com


Pixel farming: "plots" of 10 by 10 centimeters

The Almkerk Campus in the Netherlands applies pixel farming. Each “plot” measures 100 square centimeters. Different crops are grown together. The consumer determines which crops are grown.
See futurefarming.com


Sustainable ag intensification and climate adaptation top USDA’s science agenda by Sarah Mock

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is prioritizing sustainable ag intensification with a focus on regenerative ag, water conservation, precision and digital agriculture, and climate adaptation, according to the agency’s chief scientist.

Speaking at an event in Washington DC on Wednesday, Scott Hutchins previewed the department’s Science Blueprint, which outlines the agency’s research priorities through 2025.
See agfundernews.com


Good old days (?????) : Travail aux champs par Marcel Arnaud (vu sur artnet.fr)

 


5 things to think about when marketing new tech to farmers by Jeff Caldwell

When John Deere released its first steel moldboard plow in 1837, it revolutionized crop production and was very much high technology for its era. But it also created the necessity of change for farmers, and that was difficult for some. Now, agriculture technology startups and established companies face the same challenge in an already tight marketplace for farmers and ag professionals.

The agtech sector has exploded in the last decade, as just about everybody with ties to an ag company — be it an early-stage startup or century-old established corporation — knows well. As it’s evolved, so too has a sort of pecking order of companies based on venture funding, market readiness, and commercial sales. That pecking order underscores a set of dynamics between companies and their customers, and often determines those who talk the talk and those who walk the walk...
See agfundernews.com


Germany’s Agrando closes seed funding for online agribusiness marketplace, by Richard Martyn-Hemphill

Every season, farms have to fork out serious cash for huge stacks of inputs, whether that’s feedstuffs, fertilizers, or pesticides. Anywhere in the world, the traditional way to get hold these is via locally-connected networks of retailers who work closely with farmers year by year, building up close personal relationships.
See agfundernews.com



France’s Sencrop acquires sensor maker Visio-Green in start of consolidation play, by Lauren Stine

Sencrop, which provides weather data to farmers throughout Europe with its agro-weather stations and sensors, has acquired Visio-Green Agriculture, a subsidiary of Latitude GPS in what Sencrop’s co-founder indicated would be the first “in a process of consolidation and bringing more value to farmers.”

Founded in 2016, Visio-Green makes sensors for agriculture including agro-weather stations and irrigation probes. It currently maintains 1,800 stations, which will be added to Sencrop’s existing network of 9,500 weather stations.
See agfundernews.com


Leaf Agriculture comes out of stealth with agtech API to integrate your farm data, by Lauren Stine

Countless startups, VCs, and corporates are hard at work building the agri-foodtech ecosystem, but one startup is hoping to provide some much needed digital glue for the app-based offerings in the segment.

Describing itself as providing the industry’s “critically-needed infrastructure,” Leaf has developed an API intended to make it easy for anyone to seamlessly transfer data between hundreds of agriculture data sources through one simple integration. It raised an undisclosed pre-seed round in March 2019 from ACE Startups and Radicle Growth, according to Crunchbase.
See agfundernews.com


TerraSentia robot

The robot is designed to generate the most detailed portrait possible of a field, from the size and health of the plants, to the number and quality of ears each corn plant will produce by the end of the season, so that agronomists can breed even better crops in the future. In addition to plant height, TerraSentia can measure stem diameter, leaf-area index and “stand count” — the number of live grain- or fruit-producing plants — or all of those traits at once (source NYT)

EarthSense is creating dramatic new possibilities for crop breeders, plant protection products developers, crop scientists, and field agronomists.

Our first robot—TerraSentia—improves the quantity, accuracy, cost and speed of in-field plant trait data collection, especially for under-canopy traits that cannot be obtained by other technologies.

Our machine vision and machine learning based analytics seamlessly convert field data to specific, actionable information about plant-traits.

Following our successful 2019 field season, we have improved TerraSentia hardware, software, and analytics based on these pioneering users' experience.
See EarthSense.co


Good old days (?????): La moisson par Léon Lhermitte (Salon de 1874)

 


A Growing Presence on the Farm: Robots, By Knvul Sheikh

A new generation of autonomous robots is helping plant breeders shape the crops of tomorrow.
See nytimes.com


The Secret Ingredient for a Sustainable Food Supply: Machine Learning
See wired.com


The world’s largest farmer-to-farmer digital network
See wefarm.co


Make reliable agricultural decisions with AI

Get to know the field in seconds and take informed actions with the OneSoil platform. To make farming simple, we analyze satellite images with machine learning technologies. For free.
See onesoil.ai


Wisdom (and wallets) of the crowd: Small Robot Company closes crowdfunding campaign at £2.1m

Small Robot Company (SRC), a British agrobotics startup, has told AFN that it has closed its latest Crowdcube equity crowdfunding campaign at £2.1 million ($2.7 million). The company has now secured a total of £4.84 million in funding to date.
See agfundernews.com


Small Robot Company is reimagining farming with robotics and artificial intelligence

Our vision is to make food production sustainable, reducing farming’s impact on the environment and increasing farm outputs globally. Our farmbots Tom, Dick and Harry will plant, feed and weed arable crops autonomously, with minimal waste.
See smallrobotcompany.com


Can a 15 minute survey help farmers adopt more tech? Growers Insight is betting on it

The agtech industry is generating more and more investment every single year, and with that comes increasing media spotlight. What was an emerging category when I started reporting for AFN around 2015 is now a fully-developed, thriving ecosystem of entrepreneurs, startups, VCs, academics, and more. And while I recently reported on a startup that remained in stealth in order to spend time learning from farmers before it announced its business to the world, that’s not been a typical story in agtech. There has been surprisingly little involvement from farmers in agtech development, which many argue is bringing about failures and lost opportunities in the industry.

“My mantra for years was that we weren’t building the right product for the right user,” says Aaron Magenheim, an agtech consultant who’s been around since the beginning. “The user is not the guy singing the check; it’s the migrant worker with a third-grade education riding around on a quad. Technology is not being built for that guy, so it’s getting bottlenecked. In the last couple of years, the tech has changed and people are realizing that it’s not being adopted because farmers don’t have a plan.”
.../...
See agfundernews.com


Good old days (?????): Les Glaneuses par Léon Lhermitte (1887)

 


You Don’t Look Jewish (classical nonsense (?) Jewish joke)

A woman on a train walked up to a man across the table. “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you Jewish?”

“No,” replied the man.

A few minutes later the woman returned. “Excuse me,” she said again, “are you sure you’re not Jewish?”

“I’m sure,” said the man.

But the woman was not convinced, and a few minutes later she approached him a third time. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?” she asked.

“All right, all right,” the man said. “You win. I’m Jewish.”

“That’s funny,” said the woman.” You don’t look Jewish.”


The distribution of this efita newsletter is sponsored by vitisphere.com

Please, contribute to the content of your efita newsletter, and advertise your events, new publications, new products and new project in this newsletter. Without your support, it will not survive!
Contact: Guy WAKSMAN
E-mail: guy.waksman(a)laposte.net


To read this newsletter on our web site
See Afia


The archives of this newsletter

See Afia


About the EFITA mailing list

You can use the efita moderated list (> 15000 subscribers) to announce any event / product / web site / joke (!) related to IT in agriculture, environment, food industry and rural areas.
If you want to subscribe a friend, please fill in his form.
If you do not wish to receive our messages, please fill in the following form...