One Page Summary

The need/challenge
FINT’s solution-QUHOMA- aims to set-up social farms and a community of young farmers that exchange data, farming practices and equipment to produce quality agrifood/ animal feed. The APP also targets crop and food mentors (agronomists, processors) that post advises and guidelines respectively, on the community’s dashboard to optimise the whole production. QUHOMA is a simple to use APP that merges the concept of collaborative farming with precision farming methods (farm sensors). Through the use of Facebook-like technology that goes hand-in-hand with the farm traceability and food safety current necessity FINT aims to lure younger generations to be active part of primary production and engage them to revolutionise the status quo and the often unfair practices of the current value chain.
In addition, the company is active part of EC’s Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition and has been awarded a pledge (http://pledgeviewer.eu/pledges/future-intelligence-94.html) to diffuse the Internet of Things technologies to the Agriculture sector and highlight their part in EU’s Digital Single Market. Last, FINT is a co-founder of a Digital Innovation Hub on IoT for digitalising SMEs http://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/digital-innovation-hubs-tool/-/dih/2092/view
Details
In details, QUHOMA is an APP of hardware and software modules that promotes collaboration among farmers and mentors of quality farming. The available hardware consists of air and soil sensors while the software platform enables remote monitoring of the farm, microclimate historic and real-time data exporting and farm calendar/ activities reporting. The Marketplace enables to share all these digital files for trust-building with farmers’ business partners (ADIBER, consumers).
More precisely, QUHOMA partners exchange microclimate data, information/ knowledge on crop consulting, record keeping, farm management and business intelligence "advice packets" As A Service. FINT deploys an IoT box with specific sensors on farms and enables farmers-the data owners- to acquire, store and/ or share them in the Marketplace where access is given to additional stakeholders like agronomists, consultantsand everyone the community has agreed on.
QUHOMA is the 1st IoT multi-stakeholder (farmers, agronomists, consumers) data-sharing platform in the area of synergetic and knowledge-intensive Agri-economy. It is a solution with a niche (quality farming) and large market (conventional Precision Farming); a clear win-win business model; developed by a capable to deliver team.
Other implications, actors, competitors
FINT deploys solar-powered sensor poles on farms that can be easily re-deployed in neighbourhood farms (for seasonal crops). An irrigation controller is currently under testing and will soon be integrated in QUHOMA for optimising irrigation scheduling. Weather and microclimate data enable pesticide and fertilise reduction while further gains can be achieved when those data are shared with skilled agronomists whose scientific guidelines optimises farm outputs.
As a starting point QUHOMA needs an existing community of users, small-scale farmers in particular that can compete on quality rather than price differentiation. It is believed that the farm productivity gains will increase when agronomists and processors jump in while the ultimate idea is to inform environmentally-sensitive consumers about those agrifood products’ sustainability.
FINT is not the one and only smart farming tools’ provider but from our knowledge QHOMA is the first solution that has an embedded data-sharing business model as a unique value proposition. This means that the company knows
what data to acquire-soil and air microclimate data and publicly available weather data
how-in the most efficient Telecom-wise using low energy standardised protocol
why- to optimise farm inputs and increase traceability
and most importantly who to share them with- farmers, agri and food mentors and ultimately consumers for competitive advantage
Last, QUHOMA facilitates central administration of crop and food production data a powerful feature when a grassroots community aims to collectively exploit and monetise the new Economy’s oil (https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource).
Lessons Learned
QUHOMA is being commercially deployed on farms in Greece and also piloted in Spain as a DEMO for a circular economy pilot. The solutions' child-diseases included the use of inaccurate sensors and some telecom-related issues that are now resolved.
QUHOMA being a crop agnostic (fruit and vegetables, herbs and permanent crops) solution FINT attracted interest from high-value crop producers from really isolated areas for whom we built energy autonomous sensor poles.
Scaling ideas include the development of new hardware for livestock production and new services' creation (plant protection).