Startup Europe Awards

Agricolus is the Italian winner of Agritech category

Country: Italy

Category:  Agritech

The Project Aim: Agricolus is a cloud applications ecosystem for precision farming with multiple purposes: disease awareness and forecasts, crop monitoring, decision support system for treatments and fertilizers, farm management and end to end traceability bringing valuable information to final users. It is already on the market and multinational agroholding companies, medium –big farms, association of farmers and government are using it successfully.

The problem to solve:

By using modern data collection technologies AGRICOLUS has the following functions:

Informatization of AGRICULTURAL MANAGEMENT for easier storage of Plot’s data and analysis, SUPPORT in order to administer differential treatments and other operations for the crops (fertilizers, plant protection products and irrigation), ALERT about diseasesand other adversities that can affect crops using proprietary algorithms.

What are the faced challenges?

  • International market competition with products coming from unruled countries that produce at very low cost. The effect is a reduction of the profit due to the need of reducing final selling prices. For this reason they have to reduce costs increasing quality at the same time.
  • Climate change requires continuous adaptation of the best time to proceed with any agricultural operation (seeding, fertilizing, manuring, irrigating, harvesting…). They need a real time support to understand the right timing for these operations.
  • AgriTech adoption is not an option but average usage in EU is far below 10% versus 80% of North America and Australia: farmers need a way to integrate these technologies in daily tasks.

What does Agritech do?

AGRICOLUS DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM is a composition of several vertical products that leverage on a common architecture that cover up to 70% of the functionalities common to all the crops, and dedicated professional algorithms for diseases forecasting and agriculture optimizations. Data are collected through satellites, drones, IoT, dedicated apps and soon with our own plug&play agriPlug device that connects tractors and other precision framing Device to Agricolus SaaS cloud.

We also provide AGRITRACK an end-to-end tracking service that can bring information on good agronomical practices directly to the end users to raise their awareness on the real value of the goods they are buying.

CEO’s testimony

Going to the final represents an opportunity to establish pilots and early adopters outside Italy, we are also seeking for industrial partners connections for supplying our products as white label (tractor producers, agro chemical companies and precision farming hardware producers) or as a bundle to improve the effectiveness of their products