Companies, Italian Factory, Agriculture 4.0, Innovation
Despite being a traditional sector, agrifood is more and more a land of technological innovations at the service of producers and final consumers
In our country only 1% of the agricultural area is digitized despite the fact that the agri-food represents about 11% of the national GDP
Digital and agriculture.
An increasingly solid combination, as told some time ago in Italian Factory, even if there is still a long way to go. Especially if you think that in our country only 1% of the agricultural area is digitized despite the fact that the agri-food represents about 11% of the national GDP, according to the Smart Agrifood Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan and the RISy Laboratory of the University of Brescia.
In short, there are unexpressed potentialities.
Yet something is moving: at the last edition of CES, the most important international hi-tech fair held in Las Vegas from 9 to 12 January, our startups presented some interesting solutions, demonstrating that it is possible to innovate also in a traditional sector like that of agriculture.
A sector in great ferment
According to the photograph taken by the Smart Agrifood Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic and the RISE Laboratory of the University of Brescia, 481 startups specialized in agrifood are worldwide, and 12% of these are Italian.
In particular, among the most promising realities in this field are the Florentine Agricolus (cloud ecosystem to support farmers in data analysis), the Friulian Bentur (with Spirugrow, a food processor able to produce spirulina alga at home , indicated as the food of the future, rich in proteins, essential acids, vitamins A, D, K and B, carbohydrates, mineral salts, which today is the salt lakes with alkaline waters) and Provenance (traceability of products at risk), just to name a few.
Tradition meets the new
If startups are notoriously more inclined and open to technological innovations, there are however cases of virtuous companies. For example the Oleificio Zucchi di Cremona and its “Filiera 4.0”, an expanded data analytics platform in which all the data relating to the production of oil are collected to allow the consumer to reconstruct the route of the product purchased, by pressing the olives until bottling.
Remaining in the area, another historical name like Latteria Soresina, the third Italian dairy group, has embraced the revolution of the Internet of things, starting a digital transformation process that last year brought to close the balance sheet with a turnover of about 334 million euros, an increase of 8% compared to the previous year.
In the Lombard cooperative, the technology is designed to bring to the tables an ethical, quality milk, produced following the strictest European standards and respecting the welfare of the animals. Animals that are healthier and happier mean better products thanks to digital, which among other things favors traceability and simplifies the administration of fodder to livestock.
With constant monitoring, in fact, it is possible to check how the cows respond to the different stimuli and intervene to “adjust the shot” in case of any inefficiencies or shortages along the process.
Sparkling technology
But if we talk about bubbles, Berlucchi is certainly one of the protagonists of the tech agrifood, if we can define it.
The company of Franciacorta, producer of the homonymous sparkling wine, has long used the technologies of the so-called precision farming, which consist precisely in monitoring the area of the wine plots.
Thanks to this massive tracking, the company is able to guarantee a better homogeneity of the vineyard and of the harvest, dosing the fertilizer and fertilizers where it is most needed.
A similar project has been developed, more in small, by the Ferrarese Porto Felloni, specialized in the cultivation of vegetables and cereals, which with the precision farming has obtained a saving of about 30% on the fertilizer used and a 20% increase on the production of corn.
Milan, March 19, 2018
The Van
Source Borsa Italiana
