The EU Project SmartAgriHubs has built a network of Digital Innovation Hubs to advance the digital transformation of the European Agrifood Sector, led by Wageningen University. Starting in 2018 with more than 100 partners, the SmartAgriHubs network today has 300+ hubs.
The project's final event took place in Lisbon on September 26 - 28. The first day brought together the project members; days 2 and 3 were designed as "Synergy Days" between SmartAgriHubs and related EU projects. The same format had been used at the project's start. This quickly led to intensive networking and successful projects, e.g. using standard meteoblue services in a new product - a platform for innovative technologies for the agricultural industry. These services were subsequently expanded with a "virtual weather station" and jointly introduced to farmers. In contrast, our top accuracy weather data are continuously stored to create a time series of historical weather data without installing a physical weather station.
During the project, hackathons were organised instead of personal meetings due to the Covid-19 pandemic. meteoblue provided the SmartAgriHub project in Latvia with consultancy, meteoblue data and diagrams. Implementers of the project found meteoblue automated services such as climate risk assessment and crop weather risk easy to integrate and saw several different use cases for using our data for new innovative applications in agriculture.
The final event allowed SmartAgriHubs partners to share current results and find future opportunities. SmartAgriHubs has attracted interest in its replication from African countries, the World Bank, and other countries and organisations, featuring meteoblue, among other resources.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 818182.
We are happy to have contributed to such an innovative EU project and look forward to continuing our cooperation in scientific projects.
