BOOST: Boosting agribusiness acceleration by training on sustainable agriculture

The World Government Summit recently launched a report entitled “Agriculture 4.0 – The Future Of Farming Technology”, calling for a green agricultural revolution, based solidly on science and technology. A major pillar of Agriculture 4.0 is Precision Agriculture (PA) or Precision Farming, a modern farming management concept (for both crop and livestock), using digital methodologies to monitor and optimize agricultural production processes. PA increases the quantity and quality of agricultural output while using less input (water, energy, fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), decreases costs, reduces the use of chemicals and therefore the environmental impact, and facilitates the production and traceability of higher quality food. Combined with increasing public awareness and demand for healthy and sustainable food, wide adoption of PA will bring new opportunities in the food value chain and will benefit all stakeholders.

BOOST aims to boost agribusiness acceleration and digital hub networking by providing a sophisticated business training programme for the application of sustainable Precision Agriculture (PA) methodologies on management, entrepreneurship & marketing, networking, and digital transformation through new organizational models (agribusiness incubators/accelerators, access to digital hubs for extraversion and knowledge dissemination), by linking Higher Education (HE), Vocational Education and Training (VET), Research and Technological Development (RTD), Farmers and Associations in a common framework based on their real training needs in PA.

Students and young farmers will be trained as future agripreneurs and Agriculture 4.0 PA adopters, challenged by real experiences with Technological and Business development ecosystems and will interact with enterprises and farmers to identify the sector’s problems and opportunities and to develop new business ideas and technologies. In the long run, the project outputs will create solid synergies between HE, VET and innovative agricultural enterprises and will eventually contribute to the efficient implementation of EU policies in agriculture, like boosting agricultural business development using Agriculture 4.0.