Digitisation is also becoming increasingly important in agriculture, for example to optimise the irrigation of crops during long dry periods. Many farms, however, lack the prerequisites for identifying suitable and affordable systems for them, recording their potential and generating benefits for them.

Regional Experimental Field EXPRESS

The basis for the interaction of existing technical infrastructures with new technologies and methods is therefore to be tested and evaluated on farms within the German experimental field EXPRESS. EXPRESS aims primarily at crop production with a special focus on special crops. Digital technologies are to be used to increase resource efficiency, support environmentally friendly production and preserve biodiversity in the long term. Innovative technologies such as sensor systems, block chain, virtual reality, field robots, and 5G applications shall help to shape new value chains and optimise production processes.

In EXPRESS, we will test potentially suitable technologies in cooperation with farmers. The results are made available to the industry. We focus on five use cases corresponding to focal areas:

• cross-scale water stress monitoring for irrigation optimisation
• automatic monitoring of abiotic key parameters, e.g. by measuring the microclimate in the crop
• food tracing via block chain
• augmented/virtual/mixed reality in agriculture
• data integration and management of highly heterogeneous data sources from various sensor systems

IMMS supports monitoring of microclimate and drought stress

IMMS is responsible for data collection and is in charge of determining the microclimate and other parameters for monitoring drought stress. Different system solution concepts for these two applications will be evaluated with agricultural enterprises. For this purpose, IMMS is testing various sensor systems available on the market for their suitability for the two use cases. This also includes an evaluation of RFID sensor technology. In addition, IMMS is equipping the experimental fields with suitable sensor technology, monitoring their operation and the transmission of data via 5G to the S2DES cloud.

IMMS develops cost-efficient autonomous sensor systems for practical use

The focus of IMMS developments is on practical, self-sufficient sensor systems. We design these systems as modularly as possible in order to later adapt them to the respective boundary conditions in an agricultural enterprise and to be able to use them there for further analyses and optimisation. The challenge here is to develop cost-effective systems that record all the necessary variables with sufficient accuracy and at the same time enable usable and, above all, useful information to be obtained with as few measuring points as possible.

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