In a world grappling with complex global challenges such as population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation, ensuring security, sustainability, and food safety is paramount. Agricultural practices and food production processes are integral to public health, economic stability, and societal well-being. However, conventional approaches have often operated in isolation, limiting our understanding and hindering scalability. The WHEATWATCHER initiative seeks to break these barriers by uniting soil health monitoring, plant health assessment, and food traceability through a cutting-edge digital soil monitoring system. This system assesses soil nutrition, chemical, and biological factors impacting wheat grains from field growth to flour production, spanning multiple European regions. By actively involving stakeholders, including farmers, mill proprietors, and policymakers, WHEATWATCHER tailors its solution to practical needs. It leverages diverse sensor technologies, advanced machine learning models, and automated mapping techniques to boost efficiency and scalability. A Decision Support System and cloud platform ensure accessible insights. At its core, a machine learning model seamlessly integrates technologies, creating a cohesive solution that bridges the gaps between soil health, plant health, and food traceability. WHEATWATCHER aims to foster harmony between sensing technologies, data processing, and stakeholder engagement, revolutionizing comprehensive monitoring.

SmartAgriHubs is dedicated to accelerate the digital transformation of the European agri-food sector. It will consolidate, activate and extend the current ecosystem by building a network of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) that will boost the uptake of digital solutions by the farming sector. This will be achieved by integrating technology and business support in a local one-stop-shop approach involving all regions and all relevant players in Europe. The heart of the project is formed by 28 flagship innovation experiments demonstrating digital innovations in agriculture, facilitated by DIHs from 9 Regional Clusters including all European member states. Concurrently, SmartAgriHubs will improve the maturity of innovation services of DIHs so that digital innovations will be replicated across Europe and widely adopted by European farmers. A lean multi-actor approach focusing on user acceptability, stakeholder engagement and sustainable business models will boost technology and market readiness levels and bring user adoption to the next level. This will be enhanced by synergetic effects between SmartAgriHubs and RIS3, since SmartAgriHubs will work in lock step with European regions to maximize the return of European investments, including regional structural funds and private capital. Open Calls with a total budget of ±6 M€ will expand the network and ensure that technological developments and emerging challenges of the agri-food sector are incorporated in the DIH service portfolio. SmartAgriHubs’ inclusive structure and ambitious targets will bring the entire European ecosystem together, connecting the dots to ensure global leadership for Europe in the AgTech market. The consortium, led by Wageningen Research and other partners of previous key projects such as IoF2020, FIWARE, S3P Agri-Food and I4MS, will leverage the existing ecosystem and guarantee a maximum ROI for European taxpayers and a vital agri-food sector producing adequate and safe food for future generations.

Digitalisation, robotics, and smart algorithms have brought the data economy to the farm. However, farms face large societal pressures related to soil: cleaner water, healthier soils, improved carbon storage and increase in biodiversity. A better understanding of the variability of soil properties and quality is needed, with current market solutions being too expensive and not well suited to farmer needs. SQAT's smart soil mapping service is a multi-level, multi-technology and multi-purpose solution. With a keen eye on markets and users, SQAT’s approach is designed to overcome today’s practical, technical and financial challenges to generate high resolution soil properties maps – and demand-driven products like application maps for soil improvement or crop management, or compliancy proof for eco schemes. Our vision is that the integration of different technologies provides a flexible and agile service beating the unbundled alternatives that are now in the market: our in-situ sampling and/or sensoring is wrapped in a Copernicus-based artificial intelligence soil mapping product. In the field, our autonomous robot-mounted sensor toolbox includes VIS-NIR sensors, automated sampler drill and penetrometer, and a novel chamber for in situ wet chemical soil analysis (Lab in the Field). Overall, the system increases the productivity and reduces laboratory/labour costs compared to current approaches. Using resulting maps, SQAT co-develops, tests and validates 5 smart farming applications to deliver value to farmers: Variable rate liming/fertilisation/seeding, Variable depth tillage, & Carbon farming MRV. We include 7 SMEs from across the SQAT data value chain to lead co-development in 7 use cases across Europe. The results will be commercialised by project end courtesy of a pro-active market focus, that aims to engage and onboard users in the use case locations, as well as other agri-service providers to develop their own SQAT-enabled smart farming applicatications.