POSITIVE: A SMART IRRIGATION PROJECT FOR AGRICULTURE 4.0 | POSITIVE: UN PROGETTO DI IRRIGAZIONE INTELLIGENTE PER L'AGRICOLTURA 4.0

POSITIVE (Scalable Operational Protocols for precision agriculture) is a precision agriculture project for variable rate irrigation designed to improve the functionality of the IRRIFRAME system, the irrigation advice service of the Emilia-Romagna region. POSITIVE is based on satellite remote sensing, the use of vegetation indices for crops, IoT (Internet of Things) technologies, Big Data and 4.0 irrigation machinery. A central server manages the information flows and provides variable rate irrigation maps for farmers as final users. The system is public and free. In the first year of "IRRIFRAME plus" system experimentation (improved version of IRRIFRAME through POSITIVE machinery), at the experimental farm located in Mezzolara di Budrio (BO - Italy), promising results have been obtained for maize, with a WUE (Water Use Efficiency) going from 4.2 g l-1 (with standard IRRIFRAME service) to 5.2 g l-1. For sparse crops, such as tomato and onion, results were not so satisfactory. The future years of experimentation will allow to improve the calibration of VI-crop coefficient (Kc) correlation in order to improve the response in condition of partial soil cover and wetting condition.