#VIDA - Overgreen

Overgreen has been developed by Evja and UMPI and tested by Cascina Alta Farm, as part of the VIDA project funded by the European Union. The objective of the decision support system for growers is to increase the quality and quantity of their yield and optimizing irrigation and chemicals usage. 

Overgreen sensor

CHALLENGES

It tackles three major global challenges:

1. The first challenge is to help growers dealing with climate change. With weather events becoming more and more unpredictable, Overgreen provides game-changing insight with the micro-climatic monitoring of the crops.
2. The second challenge tackled by Overgreen is water saving. The system offers specific suggestions on irrigation, making water management efficient.
3. The third and final challenge is food healthiness, thanks to disease predictive models that help forecasting the attack of crop pathogens, hence optimizing the usage of pesticides. The result is a lower pollution of water and soil, and a final produce with less to none chemical residue.

RESULTS AND FUTURE APPLICATIONS 

The VIDA voucher allowed us to set up the new product and validate it on the field from February 2020 to March 2021. The overall goal of the project was to provide healthier food, with more abundant yield and minimum environmental impact. This goal has been achieved, with registered savings of irrigation water of 53% and pesticides savings of 55%, leading to a lower environmental footprint and higher food healthiness.

Once on the market, Overgreen will allow growers to have total control on their crop cycle, optimize the usage of pesticides in order to avoid harvest loss due to pests and plant diseases, hence increasing the potential quantity of yield farmed on the same area. Growers will also be able to forecast their production output by constantly checking the status of their crop and relying on data analytics to evaluate the potential yield. The agronomic suggestions will also help growers with low agronomic know-how to farm more effectively and efficiently which means more food available for people everywhere in the world.

In this project, Overgreen has been working with baby leaves grown in greenhouses, but it is designed to work with every kind of crop and in every farming environment, including open fields and vertical farms.