Beginners and those interested in vegetable gardening often do not have sufficient agronomic knowledge or tools to run a farm cost-extensively and economically. Even trained gardeners often find it difficult to set up a complex cultivation plan that takes into account agronomic expertise and economic efficiency.

Professional tools that facilitate intuitive planning and design of the beds and support the vegetable gardener from the beginning are hardly available. This leads to the fact that self-employment towards an own market garden or an own solidarity agriculture (SoLaWi) does not even come into being or farms are sometimes abandoned. The transition to bio-intensive farming methods and the achievement of the 2030 climate goals is thus proceeding only slowly.

Decision Support Tool as a central element for deriving recommendations for action

The aim of the EIP-Agri project OpenOrganicFarm is to develop a publicly accessible online tool that makes it easier for gardeners and interested parties to get started in vegetable farming. The concept of the Maktgarten is the main model.

During the three-year project period, on the one hand, an agronomic knowledge database with data and expertise on selected crops for bio-intensive vegetable cultivation will be developed. In addition to in-depth agronomic text articles, a professional video series on the modular structure of a small-scale bio-intensive vegetable farm with written instructions will be produced. However, the heart of the project will be a decision support tool in the second step, which will use artificial intelligence (knowledge-based methods, knowledge graphs) to correlate the existing data in such a way that economic conclusions with recommendations for action and planning steps for an individual, site-adapted, small-structured bio-intensive vegetable farm can subsequently be output.

More information and a dedicated project page will follow soon.

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Contact:
Gerrit Woeckner
gerrit.woeckner@nature-robots.de

Funding source

The OpenOrganicFarm project is funded by the EU and the state of Lower Saxony. The aim of the EIP Agri funding measure is the further development of agriculture with improved environmental and resource protection. In particular, such innovations are promoted that address the social challenges of our agricultural and food sector.