Leveraging Agri-food IoT Solutions to Connect Apiary Owners and Farmers

Abstract

Agriculture as a whole consists of many sectors reliant on each other for proper functioning. The need for cross sector cooperation is especially important between apiary owners and farmers. Indeed, it provides benefits for both: increasing and diversifying access to appropriate flowering plants on one hand and providing means of increasing pollination of plants and in turn yield from fields on the other. On the contrary, lack of information may result in poisoning beehive families operating near regions where specific plant protection products have been used. However, even although IT and IoT solutions are increasingly prevalent in agri-food sectors, there is still a significant barrier in connecting various systems, exchanging data and helping users in facilitating modern solutions. In this paper we present a viable solution to this problem by leveraging DEMETER platform and show it’s usage to enable interoperability between commercial IoT beekeeper solution and emerging national farm management (eDWIN) and advisory tools.