OBJECTIVES

Within the context of this project 'farm' constitutes any provider of raw food material, be it farm, fishery, vineyard or other form of production. The farm constitutes the beginning of the food chain, and is the first stage at which the constituents of the final product are identified and catalogued. The likely information that can be associated with these ingredients are:

• Place of origin
• Time of harvest
• Growing conditions
• Chemicals, additives, pesticides, etc used during growth
• Duration of storage before transportation
• Storage conditions before transportation

 

DESCRIPTION OF WORK

Task 4.1 Identification of role within business process
The aim of this task is for each use case, identify the information which is important to the business process, both of the farmer and downstream.

Task 4.2 Identification of technology
This task will identify ways of gathering that information, generally through a combination of sensor networks to monitor growing and storage conditions and RFID to identify batches of product. Typically:

• RFID batches will be tagged on harvest and associated with the sensor data monitoring their growth.
• Enumeration of suitable technologies, standards & frequency bands
• Enumeration of available chips, chipsets, development kits, and other hardware requirements: reader speed, RF link range, reader portability
• Analysis of possible accomplishments to EU directives on RF power emissions
• Analysis of materials used according to food sanitary normative, in order to implement passive or active tags
• Optimisation of placing tags on products, tag forms and antenna design

Task 4.3 Identification of pilot sites
At least four sites will be identified. The aim is to identify sites which provide the starting point for the value chain of the products to be used in the demonstrators, for instance grapes, chocolate ingredients (e.g. milk), fish, etc.
Task 4.4 Deployment
This task will undertake instalment of equipment and software in the pilot sites, training of personnel from the sites and testing of the systems prior to the pilots going live.

Task 4.5 Evaluation
This task will monitor the operation of the pilots, assess the effectiveness of the equipment and systems and evaluate the impact on the business process of the farm.