Hortus Gymnasium:
Information Communication Technology (ICT) for agricultural production

Hortus Gymnasium pursues maximization in the use of Information Communication Technology for agricultural production and the marketing of products and services. In agriculture, the primary sector, the rural population has remained more excluded than in other productive sectors from the use of new information technology and telecommunication technologies for factors linked to geographic and cultural isolation as well as of a generational nature. It’s difficult to hypothesize a rapid spread of Smart Farming on national soil without an indispensable rise in awareness and training of farmers to use computers, perhaps relying on cutting-edge companies, as Hortus Gymnasium would like to be. However, the prospects for the new Community Farm Policy should provide an important boost to ICT’s dissemination in agriculture in line with other support policies: the new Digital Agenda for Europe and EU Broadband Strategy. It is about reinterpreting existing farming practices through the use of data-based technologies without replacing the skills and intuition of the farmer. Additional skills, brought on by Smart Farming will be: obotics, GPS technology and everything that can be detected with sensor systems in relation to weather forecasts, environmental controls, processing and transport monitoring.

In practice, Hortus Gymnasyum uses software for farming purposes processing:

• climate data,
• information regarding the use of resources (soil, water, energy),
• information regarding the agricultural production (crops, handling and processing),

collected through sensors and monitoring systems. The collected data are stored and processed using the “Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition” SCADA software to automatically launch suggestions (alarms) and ready-interventions for the management. It is a form of support for real-time data ICT-based agronomic operations, capable of providing information on all aspects of agriculture with a degree of detail and precision that could not be achieved before, which allows to act with lower risk of waste, while ensuring maximum efficiency in operations.