CAgriLab

Consolidated virtual living lab platform for knowledge sharing and adaption in regenerative agriculture

Project information

Project	CAgriLab – Consolidated virtual living lab platform for knowledge sharing and adaption in regenerative agriculture
Duration	1.2.2025 – 31.1.2028
Partners	Technological University of the Shannon (Ireland, coordinator), Häme University of Applied Sciences (Finland), Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (Poland), CGFP Sp. zo.o. (Poland)
Funders	Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry The consortium is funded through the ICT-AGRI-FOOD 2024 Joint Call
Budget	Häme University of Applied Sciences 285 715 €

We are establishing a consolidated virtual living lab platform in an international project to enhance knowledge exchange in agriculture. This will support collaboration and data sharing, helping farmers adopt and adapt regenerative practices to improve soil health and promote sustainable agriculture.

Regenerative agricultural practices seek to maintain, or where possible enhance, soil health towards a more sustainable agricultural production model. Diverse production environments and socio-cultural factors result in equally diverse set of practices. In a quest to establish evidence-based discovery and formulation of such practices, by 2030, 100 soil health living labs will be established in the EU (as per the “A Soil Deal for Europe ” mission). Currently, these labs and farmers remain isolated, hindering the discovery, access, and replication of knowledge and best practices across labs and farmers. Moreover, regenerative agriculture practices, e.g. intercropping and cover cropping, are location-specific due to variations in soil types, climate conditions, and ecological characteristics. This variability poses challenges in generalizing or exporting practices without significant adaptations.

To address these issues, the project aims to establish a consolidated virtual living lab using digital twin, dataspace, blockchain, and AI technologies. This platform will enable real-time data sharing and collaboration among isolated farmers and labs, facilitating the exchange of regenerative agriculture practices across diverse environments and generating farm-specific recommendations.

Target group

The primary target group of the project consists of farmers and agricultural sector stakeholders. Researchers will also benefit from the project, and it can be utilized in planning activities at the international level.

Operating area

The international project is coordinated by Technological University of the Shannon (Ireland). Häme University of Applied Sciences (Finland), Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (Poland), and CGFP Sp. z o.o. (Poland) act as project partners. The digital platform developed within the project will enable the integration of all European living lab and Lighthouse farms under one roof.

Project objectives:

1) Develop a decentralised platform for managing digital twins of farms and living labs, allowing both farmers and labs to create their own digital twins, upload multimodal temporal-spatial data about their farms, track data usage, and monetise digital assets. Blockchain and smart contracts will be used to automate the above processes.

2) Develop low-cost AI driven tools to measure indicators of soil health and diversity towards localization of regenerative agriculture practices to specific agroecological context. Low-cost sensors, e.g. smartphones and low-cost spectral cameras, will be used to measure and estimate soil health parameters. AI based data correlation tools will be developed to enable discover, access, and replicate best practices in different soil living labs. The tools will encourage evidence-based adoption of regenerative agriculture. The approach is aligned with the smart specialisation strategy of the Finnish Kanta-Häme Region concerning smart agriculture.

3) Develop a standardized interoperable framework to improve knowledge exchange and reusability of effective regenerative agricultural practices, including establishing standardised vocabularies and semantics, common data formats, and data protocols for seamless sharing and exchange of farm data across platforms. It will leverage existing standards and models like AIM (based on OGC and W3C), and extend and adapt them if necessary. Existing tools for data integration and harmonisation will be customized to ensure interoperable data feeding the digital twins. Robust Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) aligned with standards like OGC APIs will enable smooth integration and functionality across diverse platforms and users.

4) Pilot development and farmer engagement: Create digital twins of farms and living lab in Poland, Finland and Ireland, to prototype the networked virtual platform.

The key impact of the project includes:

1) Enhanced Collaboration: The platform will serve as a collaborative space for sharing insights and strategies, accelerating the adoption of regenerative practices. (e.g. for SOILL, SOILCRATES, and individual farmers)

2) Localized Solutions: The platform will help farmers implement sustainable practices that are most effective for their specific conditions.

3) Ecological Impact: The project will promote practices that restore soil health, increase beneficial biodiversity/abundance of beneficial soil microbes and fauna, and optimize resource utilization.

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