Agricolus: digital tools to make the best decisions for agronomic management

Agricolus is an innovative company that develops digital tools for agriculture. Based in Perugia, Umbria - the "green heart" of Italy – it aims to support the work in the field of farmers and technicians, but also the organizations of the agri-food chain such as associations, consortia, cooperatives, food processors. 

Agricolus’ app and platform for precision farming have been developed to help farmers digitazing the farm in a simple, efficient and sustainable way.  

The digital experience of Fondazione per l’Istruzione Agraria

Fondazione per l’Istruzione Agraria is run under an integrated farming regime, which requires compliance with regional cultivation specifications. The most important tree crops include olives of about 50 hectares, vines for another 50 hectares and hazelnuts, with a planted area of 50 hectares and a plan to expand to about 90 hectares.

Most of the fields are planted with arable crops such as soft wheat, durum wheat, barley, lentils, beans, spelt, grain and fodder maize, fresh peas for the freezing industry, and vegetables such as tomatoes, melon, courgette, cabbage and spinach.

In addition to field cultivation, the farm also carries out nursery activities for the production and distribution of hazelnut seedlings of the Tonda Francescana® variety, patented by the University of Perugia, and other classic varieties of the Italian hazelnut industry.

Alongside all these dynamics is the zootechnical activity with the management of a beef stable with Chianina breed.

Fondazione per l’Istruzione Agraria’s fields

The needs

Due to the farm size, the needs were to have a system that would simplify the stages of monitoring the state of health of the crops, organize and coordinate the management of the farm, collect and integrate all the data coming from the field (and not only), in the perspective of carrying out interventions focused on the needs of the individual crops.

They got to know Agricolus in the context of initiatives to get knowledge of the territorial context and operators working within it.

Agricolus installing a weather station and carrying out crop scouting with the app

Agricolus’ features that helped most in agronomic management

The platform is mainly used for crop monitoring thanks to the possibility to have, every 2-5 days at a resolution of 10 meters, satellite imagery of individual fields with several vegetation indices useful for analyzing the state of health, such as vigor, water stress and chlorophyll.

Another feature of Agricolus is to collect and display all data detected by the many sensors present on the farm, such as weather stations and soil humidity sensors. Data and alerts derived from integrated decision support systems are very useful.

They also use it to register all the crop operations that have taken place in the fields, so that they were able to create a history of all the activities that have been carried out over time.

Satellite Imagery feature in Agricolus platform

Advantages to be highlighted

“Agricolus is a well-structured system, very easy to use and intuitive, even for those approaching this type of software for the first time. Being a web platform, it does not require any major hardware tools, only a connection to internet and it is accessible everywhere, both in the office and in the field. It is a constantly evolving tool, and each update brings improvements to existing systems and introduces new features.

A very positive note is the efficiency of the helpdesk which, once a problem or difficulty in using the platform is reported, can give exhaustive answers within a few minutes”.

Mauro Brunetti and Matteo Stabile

Fondazione per l’Istruzione Agraria di Perugia

The features for precision farming in Agricolus app and platform are several:    

·      geolocated field mapping 

·      weather forecast and sensors 

·      satellite imagery Sentinel2 with vegetation indices   

·      forecast models for phenology, irrigation, fertilization, pests and diseases    

·      crop scouting 

·      task management   

·      prescription maps for fertilization  

·      register for crop operations, machinery, production lots 

·      sustainability indicators 

The advantage is having all these technologies available within a single easy-to-use tool, able to integrate data and provide farmers with a Decision Support System (DSS) to act at the right time according to the real needs of the crop.  

Forecast models feature in Agricolus app