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The first company in Italy to have introduced smart farming tools in the tomato supply chain, with the support of xFarm. Goals: quality, sustainability, supply chain traceability and third-party certification.
Tomato Farm S.p.a. is a leading Italian tomato processor. The company collaborates with more than 200 contributing farmers over an area of about 2,000 ha and offers various semi-finished products derived from fresh tomatoes harvested near the Pozzolo Formigaro (AL) plant including pulp, diced, puree and concentrates. On average, 1,500 tons of tomatoes are processed daily. Tomato Farm's technicians, in agreement with the producer organizations and the farmers themselves, take care of the entire production chain, from greenhouse planting to marketing, via cultivation, harvesting, delivery and packaging.
The collaboration with xFarm stems from Tomato Farm's desire to take full advantage of the potential of digital technologies applied to agriculture in order to provide even more timely support to tomato growers, increase the efficiency of the entire supply chain, and improve the sustainability performance of individual contributing farms. Using the platform Analytics of xFarm, row leaders can view data on registered farms - inputs, operations carried out, irrigation and defense interventions - in real time and within a single app. In this way, monitoring compliance with specifications and managing the production cycle will become easier and more efficient.
The project, which for now involves 30 conferring farms covering 150 hectares, aims to digitize the entire supply chain with the goal of increasing production quality, sustainability, and implementing an innovative solution for the verification of data useful for the traceability of the final product. The verification of the goodness of the data, will be entrusted to the international certification body RINA, which will offer third-party digital guarantees.
With the farm management platform provided by xFarm, tomato farmers can digitize their business by taking advantage of various features-for example, "Fields" for managing plots, "Activities" for scheduling and recording operations, and "Warehouse" for managing inventory and stock.
In addition to the management platform of base, among the more advanced functions of xFarm are modules designed to support farmers in making agronomic decisions. IoT sensors from xFarm, once installed on the various conferring farms, will enable the collection of localized environmental data. On base of this data, tomato farmers will then be able to take advantage of the decision support systems built into the platform, useful for better agronomic management of tomatoes in terms of efficiency and sustainability. In particular, the defense module, on base of the leaf wetness detected by the sensor xLeaf, will allow to closely follow and predict the evolution of phytopathologies in the field and to receive alerts and management advice for the main tomato adversities such as downy mildew, powdery mildew and bacterial diseases. Automatic insect monitoring traps from xFarm , the xTraps, will allow for constant monitoring of the presence of the tomato borer moth(Tuta absoluta), displaying captures in real time, and thus planning integrated pest management strategies. On base of catches, theapp suggests the best time to intervene, maximizing the effectiveness of control operations.
In addition to decision support systems and forecast models useful for crop protection, xFarm also provides models forirrigation. Using data recorded by xNode soil moisture sensors and rainfall data,app will provide useful tips and strategies to increase the efficiency of irrigation interventions so that tomato growers can irrigate where they need to, when they need to, and how much they need to. By combining the data entered, the platform will calculate the product's water footprint.
The result of improved and more efficient crop protection and irrigation management will be increased product quality, savings in production costs, and gains in sustainability of the entire supply chain.
With regard to climate-altering emissions, too, the technology of xFarm makes it possible to make an additional effort in the commitment to improving the performance of companies: through the sustainability module , whose methodology is being validated by RINA, it is possible to visualize and analyze the performance of individual contributing companies in terms of emissions and to identify the causes of environmental impact for each crop. In this way, best practices adopted by the most virtuous farms can be studied and promoted.
The calculation of the carbon footprint per kg of product (or per hectare cultivated) is carried out on base of the data actually recorded by the sensors in the field or entered by the farmers themselves within the platform: it is therefore primary data, which allows the most realistic estimate possible of the environmental impact of each individual farm. Results on sustainability that, for the 30 farms involved in the project, will be certified by the certifying body Rina. This is all with a view to reducing the use of agronomic inputs and improving, year by year, the sustainability of the supply chain, extending the project to the entire pool of contributors (more than 200 farms) over the next 3 years.
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