Researchers from Europe and Brazil learn about experiments with precision irrigation

European and Brazilian researchers were in the Southeast and Northeast regions of the country this week to learn about experiments that are being developed for precision irrigation management in winemaking and soybean cultivation. The field activities are part of the Smart Water Management Platform (SWAMP) project, approved in 2017 in the 4th Brazil-European Union Coordinated Call for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

Among the objectives of SWAMP is the implementation of a sensing and control system based on the internet of things (IoT) to manage water use in two pilot projects led by Embrapa. The Guaspari winery, in Espírito Santo do Pinhal, located in Serra da Mantiqueira, on the border between São Paulo and Minas Gerais, and the Rio de Pedras farm, in Barreiras (BA), in the Matopiba region, host the experiments. Two other project pilots are under development in Spain and Italy.

The visit to the Guaspari winery, on Monday (26), impressed the researchers due to the technological level adopted to cultivate the vines and produce high-quality wine. The old coffee farm combined boldness and innovation around 50 hectares of vineyards divided into 12 plots, according to the different terroirs found at the site. The result of the effort is the annual production of 90 thousand bottles of the cultivated varieties of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Petit Verdot, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah and Viognier.

“The place meets all the conditions for carrying out the experiment. It is a very beautiful place, using advanced technologies, and will certainly contribute to adding information to the various experiments being carried out here in Brazil and Europe”, said the project coordinator abroad, researcher Juha-Pekka Soininen, from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland Ltd. The technology company is linked to the Finnish Ministry of Labor and Economy.

The professor at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), Carlos Alberto Kamienski, says that the project members are visiting all the experiments to learn about the real needs of those who will benefit from the implemented technology. “On visits on-site visit, we are looking for the details, what are the challenges, the objectives, the user's expectations, to develop an adequate precision irrigation technology that is adaptable, with relative ease, to other crops and in other places. Therefore, the project works with four pilot projects, two in Brazil and two in Europe”, he explains.

Embrapa is responsible for conducting the implementation and evaluation of the two pilot units covered by the project. In addition, it will collaborate in research to overcome, together with Brazilian and European researchers, the challenges of instrumentation and construction of the computational platform for collecting, integrating, storing, processing and visualizing data from experiments.

In Brazil, SWAMP is led by UFABC professor, Carlos Alberto Kamienski, with the participation of 11 institutions. Among them are the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), the University Center of the Ignatian Educational Foundation "Padre Sabóia de Medeiros" (FEI), located in São Bernardo do Campo (SP), the University of Bologna, in Italy, Intercrop, from Spain, in addition to Embrapa and VTT. The visit was attended by 22 representatives from six institutions that are part of SWAMP.

Researchers Marcos Cezar Visoli, from Embrapa Informática Agropecuária (Campinas, SP), André Torre Neto, Ednaldo José Ferreira and Luis Henrique Bassoi, from Embrapa Instrumentação (São Carlos, SP), who are part of the SWAMP project team, accompanied the visit, together with the general head of Embrapa Instrumentação, João de Mendonça Naime.

Bassoi and Torre Neto have been carrying out experiments at the Guaspari winery since 2016, where they implemented research and development work on precision agriculture in winemaking. Bassoi says that the challenge “is to provide the user with a user-friendly management system, which allows irrigation management to be carried out that takes into account the spatial variability that naturally occurs in the vineyard, and in accordance with the operability of the installed irrigation system”.

In the Matopiba region, considered the great national agricultural frontier, also under the responsibility of Embrapa Instrumentação, an intelligent variable rate irrigation (VRI) platform will be developed and evaluated, intended for central pivots and localized irrigation. The researchers visited the region on Wednesday (28).

According to researcher Torre Neto, the platform will be integrated with management tools and applications aimed at the rational use of water and energy. "The proposal is to provide the farmer with a daily dynamic recommendation map, according to a set of real-time information on climate, soil, growing conditions, as well as the levels and quality of water supply and distribution systems in the field, all obtained by the platform. The objective is also to irrigate in a variety of ways according to the specific needs of sub-areas of the pivot, called management zones", he says.

SWAMP extension The intelligent water management platform − Smart Water Management Platform (SWAMP) − has an execution period of three years, starting in December 2017.

The proposal competed with 50 others submitted by more than 300 institutions to the Horizon 2020 Program (H 2020), the largest research and innovation program created by the European Union (EU), with around 80 billion euros of funding to be implemented over the period. from 2014 to 2020. The objective of the call is to strengthen the synergy between the existing competencies in the research and development (R&D) communities in Brazil and the EU, with emphasis on institutions with strong involvement with industries.