Roccolo site: Testing ground for smart agriculture

Project in brief

The Roccolo site is the testing ground of Weatherbound. Here, we cultivate different crops and vegetables to calibrate our irrigation and weather monitoring models, and we control the irrigation of selected crops. A weather and soil monitoring station provides data about the cultivars, and additional sensors are used to benchmark the model’s predictions and fine-tune the results.

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The monitoring stations require advanced hardware programming skills. Here the IT team is making sure that the station is working properly and that sensors are delivering high-quality results.

The team while working to plant 2 patches of maize to test the irrigation model. The left patch will be watered traditionally, whereas the right patch will have an optimized irrigation schedule.

Healthy maize plants growing under the summer sunshine of southern Ticino represent a success for the irrigation management tool being developed by Weatherbound.

Team members often go to check the status of the cultivars at the test site. Here the results of our controlled irrigation patch on the growth of maize is being evaluated.

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