On 16 December 2019 the 1st Regional Workshop of INNOSETA project in Greece was held at Agricultural Association of Pella, in Giannitsa, under the topic of "Precision Spray Technologies in the Greek Orchards", which was organized by INNOSETA’s project partner AGENSO.
Under this topic, three projects that AGENSO participates were presented to local stakeholders. More specifically SymbIoT project was presented by the Project Manager & Coordinator Mr. Savvas Rogotis, from NEUROPUBLIC. SymbIoT aims to address key challenges in the precision farming domain and it will provide precision farming services, accessible to the average Greek farmer. He explained the aim and the objectives of the project, as well as the results of its ongoing work. He talked about the project’s GNSS-based work and services for the agricultural sector in the Session of “Precision spraying technologies in Greece”. He underlined the importance of precise application of crop protection products in orchards and the way that SymbIoT can contribute to this.
Also EffiSpray, in which AGENSO is Coordinator was presented by Dr. Angela Laiou from AGENSO. EffiSpray is a tool that calculates depending the weather conditions the ideal timeslot for spraying operations making predictions for the next five days. She had the opportunity to explain the main objectives of the project and present the positive impact that it has to the entire production, the operation costs and the environment. After that, there was a quick demonstration of the interactive map of the tool in which the user can easily find the area of interest, and by clicking on it, it can view the spraying calendar with the optimal dates for spraying. Additionally, she pointed out that EffiSpray is an easy to use tool and is available on Google Play Store, free of charge. It covers more than 1.000 areas in Greece giving high precision and accuracy on the predictions.
OPTIMA “Optimised Pest Integrated Management to precisely detect and control plant diseases in perennial crops and open-field vegetables” was presented by Dr. Thanos Blafoutis from the Institute for Bio-Economy and Agri-Technology (iBO). He explained the structure of the project and the several systems that will be developed, as well as its 5 main objectives: optimization of plant disease prediction models and development of advanced early disease detection methods, evaluation of Plant Protection Products, enhancement and development of precision spraying technologies, test and evaluation of the proposed Integrated Pest Management (IPM) elements under field conditions and assessment of health, environmental and socioeconomic impacts and risks of the IPM system. Finally, he mentioned the impact of the project and its relation to spraying applications in orchards.
Find out more about INNOSETA, SymbIoT, EffiSpray and OPTIMA at their websites: