Smart Agriculture (Salerno - Italy)

Smart Agriculture is increasingly becoming an essential element to face climate change and achieve sustainability of natural resources. Therefore, more and more companies have been deploying technological solutions to address specific agricultural issues.

EVJA, an Italian start-up in the area of IoT and Smart Agriculture, developed a project in Salerno to monitor the production of “baby leaf” fourth-generation vegetables with a sensor platform from Libelium. The company created a hardware and software solution equipped with predictive algorithms and connected to wireless sensor networks, enabling a better harvest and a healthier production, in line with the distributors guidelines. Efficient use of fertilizers and pesticides and irrigation schedules are essential to achieve adequate results and save money, therefore a monitoring system is needed to control all the critical aspects.

Libelium’s Waspmote Plug & Sense! Sensor Platform was installed in different locations of the leaves production site to monitor environmental parameters such as temperature, relative humidity and air pressure, luminosity and leaf wetness. Technology such as 4G and LoRaWAN communications is used to connect the sensors to the cloud, and the data that is gathered is processed and displayed on a software platform hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud.

The use of this product can lower costs with pesticides by 10%, having a return of investment of about one year, and it also reduces time-to-market and need of water for irrigation.