AGreen'Smart - Make agriculture sustainable through smart farming

AGreen’Smart is a project aiming to link the added-values gathered from the use of digital technologies in crop farming and animal husbandry (respectively precision agriculture and precision livestock farming), and related tools to valorize data (big data, artificial intelligence or robotics) and the mitigation and adaptation to climate change for a more sustainable agriculture, including economic, environmental and social challenges. AGreen’Smart will focus on the achievement of these environmental and climate-change goals (the “Green” part) through the use of digital technologies (the “Smart” part) in agriculture.
For the two last decades, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has centered the support to the producer and increasingly put environmental at the center of the conditions for financial support. The current CAP (2014-2020) is promoting  ustainable farming and innovation in order to strengthen the competitiveness of the sector. The post-2020 CAP (2021-2027) guideline has been already described and three of its nine objectives focus on dealing with environmental and climate change challenges. In addition, in 2019, following the declaration of “a smart and sustainable digital future for European agriculture and rural areas”, practically all Member States mentioned the crucial inputs of new technologies and digitization in agriculture to support “a higher environmental and climate ambition” in this new CAP. Nevertheless, the adoption of these technologies by farmers is still low in EU, and their role to ensure the achievement of these “green” ambitions is still blurry. That is why AGreen’Smart wants to improve the training of the young generation of engineers to understand and to be aware of the importance of considering technologies as levers of the improvements of agricultural practices to be more adapted to current context of climate in different European regions and to reach their sustainability.
Our program aims to answer these issues through the following objectives and activities by:
- establishing and continuing a high-quality European teaching network on different and transdisciplinary subjects;
- maintaining perennial European partnerships between Higher Education Institutes, in the pedagogical and research domains, public authorities and private companies for the improvement of higher education that is more in agreement with the professional and labour market needs;
- training three student cohorts over the program and by providing transdisciplinary skills in agriculture, use of digital technologies in crop farming and animal husbandry, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, sustainable agriculture and agroecology;

- providing to a large public the possibility to improve their knowledge about the previously cited domains through the construction of a catalogue of open access online courses;

- cultivating research partnerships between Higher Education Institutes and the professional sector for the development of innovative technologies for a more sustainable agriculture where benefits could reach the most important end-users of this sector: the farmers;
- developing a continuous training offer, leading to the development of a full master program about “smart and green agriculture” for the next generation of engineers who will be in permanent contact with the socio-professional sector and the farmers during their career.