Smart Farming Tech Offers Sprout Of Hope In Greece - Barron's

Mournos, 25, employs a Greek smart-farming app to boost accumulation of his family's fabric fields and effect trees.

Using real-time information recorded by a upwind station, helium tin analyse and correlate the interaction of upwind conditions connected his 10-hectare (nearly 25-acre) fabric plantation.

"We've managed to trim the usage of fertiliser and irrigation... (and thereby to) summation the fiscal return" of the farm, said Mournos, who gave up studying machine subject astatine assemblage to give himself to the household holding successful the municipality of Platy.

Measuring the humidity oregon the nitrogen level successful the ungraded helps to curb the excessive usage of fertilisers and saves water, helium notes.

As successful galore different confederate European countries, Greece's cultivation assemblage is chronically abbreviated of h2o and astute farming could assistance woody with that problem.

The assemblage has besides mislaid a large stock of its disposable labour successful caller decades, arsenic young radical snub workplace enactment for better-paid jobs successful services specified arsenic tourism.

Agriculture present represents just 5 percent of Greece's GDP, fractional what it was 20 years ago.

The authorities has budgeted 230 cardinal euros ($231 million) implicit the adjacent 3 years to revive the country's farming industry.

Most of that derives from the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy innovation fund.

"Most young radical successful my colony similar different jobs and person fixed up moving successful the fields," Mournos told AFP.

But helium is making a spell astatine farming, aiming to enactment astute by utilizing the farming app for respective years now.

It means helium uses 40 percent little fertiliser connected his fabric tract and tin debar utilizing 2 pesticide sprays -- altogether redeeming 9,000 euros (about $9,000) -- without affecting accumulation rates.

Analysts accidental the farming app is not wide utilized successful Greece though involvement is gradually picking up.

But persuading farmers who whitethorn beryllium little technologically minded than Mournos to clasp it faces myriad challenges.

A cardinal hurdle is the tiny size of Greek farms -- little than 10 hectares connected mean -- and the country's mostly mountainous terrain.

Greek farms are often household businesses oregon impact rented fields, making concern successful tools and practices little appealing.

Meanwhile, an "endemic" deficiency of practice among farmers prevents them sharing costs, says Aikaterini Kasimati, an cultivation technologist astatine the University of Agronomy successful Athens.

As a result, Greece lags acold down different European states successful the usage of astute farming, says Vassilis Protonotarios, selling manager of Neuropublic, a institution specialising successful integer agriculture.

He said farmers could payment from caller exertion without having to put successful costly instrumentality oregon person "specialised integer skills".

Then, there is the trouble of convincing farmers to effort thing new.

Organic husbandman Thodoris Arvanitis says his colleagues are not funny successful caller technologies due to the fact that they don't cognize capable astir them and similar long-used accepted methods.

"Farmers won't spell aft exertion erstwhile they don't person capable wealth for fuel," helium added, astatine his workplace successful the tiny municipality of Kiourka, immoderate 30 kilometres (nearly 20 miles) northbound of Athens.

Attitudes whitethorn alteration successful clip arsenic clime alteration puts further unit connected workplace costs, says Machi Symeonidou, an agronomist and creator of the cultivation IT startup Agroapps.

The warfare successful Ukraine and its interaction connected planetary nutrient supplies besides shows that it is progressively indispensable to nutrient nutrient astatine a section level, said cultivation technologist Kasimati.

"We spot a changeless degradation of fields and a autumn successful yield," she said, adding that h2o was besides becoming expensive.

"But arsenic the exertion becomes simpler and cheaper, these tools volition spot much use," she added.