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November 22, 2023 - Andriani Spa, Benefit Company, and xFarm Technologies, the tech company aiming at the digitalization of the agrifood sector, from January 2023 are engaged in a technological renewal project that kicks off today the first major Italian experimentation of regenerative agriculture applied to a legume chain. The project was born with the involvement of pilot realities located between Puglia and Basilicata, for a total of about 100 cultivated hectares, a number that is destined to grow over the three years of collaboration. The Italian Andriani Group's decision to switch to regenerative agriculture is a natural consequence of its desire to continue pursuing its goals of environmental sustainability throughout the supply chain.
Specifically, the project will cover the legume supply chain, well-known nitrogen-fixing plants that, thanks to this characteristic, can contribute to the reduction of fertilizer use. The goal is to improve the sustainability of production by collecting important agronomic data through Agriculture 4.0 technologies implemented by xFarm Technologies. Thanks to the technical support of dss+, the information collected will be used to create a validated regenerative agriculture protocol, one of the first in Italy, to be extended to the entire supply chain of Andriani Spa.
Monitoring the land on which regenerative farming practices will be implemented on this type of crop will also allow for an assessment of any benefits, including from the perspective of inclusion within crop rotation schemes, for example in the context of cereal supply chains.
Andriani presented the project at the annual meeting at the end of October with farmers who are members of the supply chain, whose aim is to consolidate the relationship between raw material producers and processors with a view to ethical, virtuous and co-evolutionary collaboration, during which the excellent results achieved during the 2022/2023 crop year were also showcased.
"Agribusiness now accounts for 31.8 percent of national GDP and, at the same time, is one of the sectors most responsible for climate-changing emissions into the atmosphere. Therefore, there is an urgent need for companies to engage in establishing entrenched value chains among the
actors in the sector, guided above all by a moral imprint, which has as its ultimate goal the upheaval of the current industrial paradigm and which allows it to grow and be at the forefront to face current and future challenges, while respecting the environment and communities. In this direction, regenerative agriculture represents an innovative and virtuous practice capable of restoring soil health, and therefore indispensable for sustainable land management," said Michele Andriani, President and CEO of Andriani S.p.A. Benefit Society .
"Regenerative agriculture represents a new approach to ensuring more sustainable productions and increasing the resilience of the entire agrifood sector. By combining dss+'s expertise in this area with the xFarm platform, which allows through Artificial Intelligence to collect and analyze large amounts of data, it is possible to understand the actual impact, at the supply chain level, of regenerative agriculture practices. In particular, it is possible to calculate important parameters, for example the effectiveness in terms of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which regenerative agriculture practices help to remove from the atmosphere by storing it in the soil in the form of organic carbon. Andriani with this project demonstrates once again its focus, but also its concreteness, in improving the sustainability of production." says Giovanni Causapruno, Global Head of B2B Agrifood business unit manager of xFarm Technologies.
Andriani, which has always been committed to implementing gradually more and more virtuous production models, has decided to take a further step toward even more sustainable production. Precisely for this reason, with the long-term goal of preserving not only soil fertility, but also valuable resources such as water, and decreasing its own emissions in the field, it has decided to embark on this new path toward regenerative agriculture.
So what are the practices that will be implemented to safeguard these resources? Reducing tillage and sowing on hard ground, keeping the soil covered with vegetation or other organic material during periods when the crop is not growing, so as to promote biological diversity and increase soil carbon content, crop rotation, and limiting the use of agronomic inputs such as fertilizers and plant protection products, but not only.
In addition, with the aim of identifying easily replicable practices, promoting only the use of the machinery stock already in place, xFarm Technologies technicians conducted a site visit to the realities involved in the pilot phase, identifying regenerative agriculture practices that could already be implemented within the plots. Through the platform of xFarm Technologies, the farms will then be asked to track every operation carried out within the various plots, which have also been mapped. Crop type, rotation, melliferous strips inserted and cover crops used will be other elements entered into the platform. Finally, at the end of the first testing phase, the implemented protocol will undergo further refinement review before being applied throughout the supply chain, thus being able to safeguard the environment and operate replicable soil regeneration on a larger scale.
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