News

Go Smart - the new agriculture in the Black Sea basin region

More than 80 people participated in a conference on the topic "Go Smart - the new farming in the Black Sea Basin", which took place on January 21, 2022. The online event of the BSB908 Smart farming project includes partners, industry representatives, and stakeholders.

The main objective of the project is to develop and implement a duplicated and converged model to prepare conditions for enabling digital transformation in agriculture and surrounding areas – a process that is intensively going on all over the world.

The project partner countries are Armenia, Greece, Georgia, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Romania. The event was opened with Silvia Stumpf, Chairman of the Board, BAA, who presented "Supporting digital transformation to increase opportunities for cross-border trade and modernization in agriculture and related sectors - our ideas for the future of BSB in agriculture".

She pointed out that support in this sector is needed for several reasons - the lack of knowledge about digitization, the BSB zone shows a generally higher share of agricultural and industrial sectors, and traditional cultivation and animal husbandry are the most popular approaches. The digitization of the agricultural sector worldwide is accelerating smart digital agriculture and its expected positive impact on society. Experts point out that most farmers are not very familiar with the rapidly changing technology and use traditional methods.

The next presentation was about the National Plan for Recovery and Sustainability of the Republic of Bulgaria. One of the focuses of the National Plan for Recovery and Sustainability of the Republic of Bulgaria is the achievement of Sustainable Agriculture.

The component aims to increase the sustainable management and competitiveness of the agricultural sector through measures to improve the economic sustainability of agricultural holdings and the industry as a whole in the context of climate change and the preservation of environmental characteristics.

This is what the partners from Armenia presented as their road map. For farms and businesses - extended farming communities, climate-based adaptive technologies, SMART villages, full digitization of commodity sales, advanced processing products.

For civil society: acquisition of knowledge by farmers in line with the current challenges of smart agriculture, development of skills and knowledge through non-formal education. Furthermore, as a result of an individual survey, the participants showed 100% interest in acquiring knowledge and skills about smart agriculture.
For the government: Develop a digital agriculture strategy, and promote digitization of farms, for example, installation of large and small agroclimatic stations, and quantitative and qualitative mapping of farms or households.
For the academic sector: Capacity building of relevant infrastructures and laboratories.
The impact and results of the application of intelligent agriculture can be: obtaining large and quality productions, optimizing economic profits, integrated application of environmental protection, increasing the sustainability of agricultural systems.

More information about the project and its activities can be found here:
Website: http://bsb-smartfarming.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BSB908SmartFarming
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bsb908
Made on
Tilda