Coordination meeting with Horizon 2020 Projects, including PoliRural

On January 9, occurred a coordination meeting with Horizon 2020 projects, including PoliRural, DESIRA H2020 – Digitalisation: Economic and Social Impacts in Rural Areas (http://desira2020.eu/), and Ruralization (https://ruralization.eu/). DESIRA aims to improve the capacity of society and political bodies to respond to the challenges and opportunities that digitalisation generates in rural areas, agriculture and forestry. The project is developing a methodology and knowledge base that makes it easier to access the past, current and future socio-economic impacts of ICT-related innovation. Ruralization is a 4 years EU-funded project under the Horizon 2020 programme, focused on the study of problems related to rural regeneration and access to land, and the implementation of policies and activities that facilitate the entry of new generations and newcomers to the farming sector. 

In this meeting, many synergies were found among the Horizon 2020 projects, and a combination of information, practices and activities will be developed in the short term. The Research Executive Agency and the organization EU Agriculture also participated in the event.

Sustainable Hub to Engage into Rural Policies and Actors – Sherpa

Digital bale – more efficient usage and life cycle management for silage bales

A good example of a project where collaboration between grassroot level stakeholders and research institute has been fruitful is Digipaali (Digital bale) project in Finland. The project works regionally in Häme but has national, and even international goals. In Digital bale project, researchers and farmers work together to solve and to develop digital applications for feed bales. The goal of the project is to develop a digital tracking and storing system for feed bales.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) was chosen to identify each bale. This project is a typical, new application of digitalization. The technology itself has been developed already years ago and is in use in many areas, contactless payment being the most common. Sensors of baling machine and the reader of RFID tag (in each bale) sends bale information to the Digital bale processor that combines the data and sends it to the server (cloud). For the farmer, the most important data of each bale are bale weight, dry matter and GPS coordinates i.e. map view where bales can be seen. Digital bale helps farmer in bookkeeping of the balecrop, in feed formulation, makes bale trade easy and helps in planning farming in general.

The project is funded by Rural Development Programme for Mainland Finland 2014–2020 under the EIP-Agri framework. The project is managed by HAMK Bio Research Unit of Häme University of Applied Sciences, but as typical for EIP-Agri project, the project leans on innovation group, having dairy farmers and baling contractors important members. Collaboration in innovation group has been very fruitful and the project has caught good amount of media coverage, articles in newspapers and professional publications, television, radio and internet due to farmers involvement and commitment.

 

More info of the project is available at:

www.digipaali.fi/en

PoliRural presented in “Beyond Alliance for Knowledge (BAK)” Seminar in Hämeenlinna

PoliRural project was presented in Beyond Alliance for Knowledge (BAK) seminar in Hämeenlinna on 26th November. The theme of the research seminar was Sustainable Society and Technology. The seminar demonstrated how solutions are found to global problems in the multidisciplinary area of smart and sustainable living. PoliRural was presented in a session of Environment and Digital Policies. Other topics in this session were Sustainability in higher education institute – case HAMK, Smart Tavastia 2018-2021 introduction of smart specialization strategy of Häme region and Circular economy: an approach for organic waste management in Brazilian urban areas.

Beyond Alliance for Knowledge (BAK) is a strategic international alliance of Häme University of Applied Sciences in Finland, VIA University College in Denmark and Feevale University in Brazil. The universities cooperate in the areas of research and education. In the seminar there were audience and presentations from each university and seminar was streamed online. Target group of the seminar was researchers, teachers and students of partner universities.

More info of the event is available at:

https://www.hamk.fi/tapahtuma/beyond-alliance-bak2019-seminar/