Italy’s national supercomputing centre, ICSC, is developing Digital Twins for precision agriculture. The Sowstain project will be developed by ICSC together with Spoke9, the Italian Digital Society research centre, and Italy’s AI foundation, IFAB.

The project will apply digital modelling and simulation systems to precision agriculture to enable farms to optimise crop management based on variables such as weather, water availability, soil characteristics, and pathogen risks. The project will create high-quality synthetic image datasets to train AI algorithms to improve the management of water resources, fertilisers, and pesticides, maximising crop yield.

Field modelling will use data from various sources such as satellites, water flows, crop health, and machine sensors, providing end-users with a comprehensive overview of the system in the form of a web dashboard. The project will also evaluate effects of weather forecasts on crops, allowing for the identification of more resilient crops and protective strategies to adopt.

The teams aim to create models for efficient resource management, as well as provide decision support through “what-if” forecasts, and translate results into economic indicators for SMEs.

The project is part funded by the NextGenerationEU recover fund and by Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), – Mission 4 Component 2.