Welcome to the second edition of our DEMETER newsletter.
COVID-19 is still with us unfortunately, but it hasn’t stopped the progress within DEMETER. We celebrated one year of work in September and we are still on track with our project plans and goals. In this edition, we share some of the highlights from our first year of collaborative work.
We also look at our recently launched Open Call #1 DEVELOP in more detail, sharing an interview with Miguel Goncalves, our Open Call manager and a recording of the first Open Call webinar from 7 th October. We learn more about the developments in the pilot projects and finally we share some information on upcoming events that might be of interest to you.
As always, if you’ve any questions please get in touch at info@h2020-demeter.eu and follow us on social media for the latest project updates.
Project Coordinator
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DEMETER - A year in review
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DEMETER celebrated its one-year anniversary in September 2020. This represents an ideal opportunity to reflect on the various milestones that have been met across the project.
The project launched in September 2019 where representatives from 60 partner organisations gathered in Waterford, Ireland to discuss the work plan and the upcoming activities. A follow-on project management meeting took place in December in Brussels to recap on the goals of the project and assess the progress made across the various work packages (WP). This was to be in the last in-person meeting of the project, at least for 2020, due to the arrival of COVID-19. However, with online technologies such as Zoom, Mural and Slack in place, the project continues to communicate effectively with regular WP and consortium calls.
Key deliverables have been submitted and any public deliverable that has been approved is available on our website at https://h2020-demeter.eu/deliverables/. The first Technical Review meeting with the European Commission and our external advisors took place on June 16 th. The review outlined how the project is moving in the right direction with recommendations on how to maximise the project’s impact. The work across our piloting activity (WP5), technical work packages (WP3&4) and multi-actor approach (WP7) is outlined further on.
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Martin Klopfer, WP5 (Pilot Management) Leader
Everything in DEMETER revolves around our 20 Pilots and the real-world use cases and requirements they bring to the table. The objective is to ensure that whatever we develop in DEMETER can be of use to other stakeholders in the smart agricultural domain, but first and foremost to the farmers. The topics, scope and size of our pilots are spanning a huge area, from saving resources, such as water and energy, to a more environmentally compatible crop management with reduced application of fertilisers and pesticides, to improved animal welfare and the tracing of complete supply chains. One of the key aspects in all activities is to put the farmers in control of their data and to support easy but secure data sharing, e.g. for benchmarking or reporting purposes.
During the initial year of our four-year project we worked closely with our farmers to properly understand their current situation, their challenges and their expectations..
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DEMETER Technical Developments
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Thanasis Poulakidas, DEMETER Integration Manager
We had significant developments on the technical front during the first year of DEMETER. After developing the overall DEMETER reference architecture, the first version of the DEMETER integration platform and tools has now been released. Its main components are: the Stakeholder Open Collaboration Space (SOCS), where farmers, experts and other stakeholders come together to collaborate and share knowledge; the DEMETER Enabler Hub (DEH), where users can browse and get access to DEMETER resources; the Agriculture Interoperability Space (AIS), where developers can integrate and deploy their DEMETER-enabled applications; and, a number of what we call DEMETER-Enhanced Entities (DEEs), which are external or partner-provided entities (things, applications, platforms, services) wrapped to offer common APIs and use common data models. The latter are specified by the Agriculture Information Model, which offers a metadata model and a number of ontologies composing a common semantic data model...
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DEMETER Open Call #1 - DEVELOP
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We catch up with Miguel Goncalves, from F6S who is the DEMETER Open Call Manager to learn more about the DEMETER Open Calls.
Can you tell us about yourself and your role in DEMETER?
I have a background in economics, and I am passionate about innovation and technology. At F6S – the largest Startup/SME community globally – I work as an EU project manager helping founders grow by connecting them with equity-free funding opportunities and other innovation support services. In DEMETER I am the open call manager, meaning that I am responsible for the co-creation and implementation of the two open calls planned in the project.
What is the objective of the 1st DEMETER Open Call?
The first DEMETER Open Call, called DEVELOP, aims to attract and engage Startups/ SMEs with technology products that can be implemented within the Agro-business. DEMETER will fund the activities of integration and interoperability of those technology solutions, and improvement of their innovation level. Such solutions will enlarge and enrich the pool of technology offers/ options of DEMETER towards the co-creation of particular solutions to overcome end-users needs and challenges.
Who is the Open Call aimed at?
The target audience of this first open call are SMEs with technology solutions addressing one of the five proposed challenges, established in any the member states of the European Union, including their outermost regions, the overseas countries and territories linked to the European Union member states, the H2020 associated countries and the United Kingdom. Potential applicants should read the Guideline for Applicants for more details about this subject.
What challenges do the Open Call expect to solve?
The DEMETER Open Call #1 – DEVELOP focus on five different challenges:
1- Soil workability and humidity monitoring: we are looking for solutions to help farmers predict the possibility of machine work in fields and enable better planting, application and harvest.
2- Interoperable Geo Tagged Photo APP: we want to facilitate the provision of geo tagged photos with specific metadata from farmers to FMIS or to Paying Agencies.
3- ISOBUS enabler: the purpose of this topic is to enable different protocols and standards in the agri-food domain, talk to each other, by enabling machinery to interoperate with other machines and platforms.
4- Blockchain-based solutions for agricultural applications: the need for traceability in the agriculture domain is well-known and it could be applied in numerous scenarios from simple supply chain monitoring, procurement tracking, crop and food production, insurance, to land registration and payment of services.
5- DEMETER Business process integration (BPM): we want to support farm managers to better use a range of data sources and to create actions based on the analysis of the collected data to improve operational efficiency.
Click here to read more of the interview with Miguel.
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DEMETER Open Call #1 - DEVELOP webinar recording
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The DEMETER Open Call #1, DEVELOP, aims to attract and engage AgriTech SMEs and start-ups that have technology products which can be implemented within the agro-business sector. Up to €30,000 equity-free funding per selected project is available. Our first Open Call webinar ran on October 7th outlining the specific challenges being addressed. Check out the video to learn more.
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Become an external evaluator for DEMETER Open call
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DEMETER aims to set up an External Poll of Evaluators (EPE) to support the review process of the proposals received from the first DEMETER open call – DEVELOP. The EPE gathers a set of recognized experts in Agri-tech domains selected through an open process to ensure transparent and consistent evaluation of the applications.
If you want to become a member of our EPE, please apply by clicking the link below.
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Multi-Actor Approach - Stakeholder Workshop
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DEMETER uses a multi-actor approach (MAA) which aims to make innovation fully demand driven,
involving various actors such as farmers/ farmers’ groups, advisors, hardware and software suppliers, businesses, etc. during the whole cycle.
As part of this MAA, we recently ran a Stakeholder Analysis workshop using Zoom and Mural. The aim of the workshop was to fully identify all stakeholders in the DEMETER project and to better understand their needs, interests and concerns with regard to DEMETER.
Following on from this, we are currently preparing a survey to share firstly with the farmers participating in the DEMETER project and secondly with a wider network of farmers, facilitated by the farmers' organisations involved in the consortium. This survey will further assess their needs and interests. Following the farmer survey, hardware and software providers will also be contacted.
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