Digital technologies today offer many immediate and practical benefits to farmers. This has already been proved in many projects that showed - on field, literally - how elements like sensors and Internet of Things solutions let farmers develop and use Smart Agriculture applications which help them in working better and raising their production levels. Furthermore, with a new attention to sustainability.

One of these Smart Agriculture projects comes from the collaboration between Pierucci Agricoltura, an Italian company based in Tuscany and specialized in fertilizers and other agriculture products, and Zerynth, who played the technological role of the partnership. Zerynth implemented Nurset: an IoT system designed for plantations remote monitoring which, using many different sensors, collects real time data on plants' growth and health.

With Nurset, Pierucci Agricoltura can now monitor in real time data concerning plants' health, irrigation performance (how much water is being used, or how much energy consumed), environmental conditions (like air temperature or wind speed). All data are stored and anayzed in cloud, and are always visible through a personalized dashboard. The system is also able to alert farmers, in real time, when crucial parameters go over or under specified tresholds.

Pierucci Agricoltura integrated Nurset with its irrigation systems, so that the digital platform can control how much water or fertilizer is used, and when. In this way, farms can - on average - double plants growth and cut water use by 20%, Zerynth estimated. Remote monitoring works so well that Pierucci staff is now directly on sites 30% less often. The remote monitoring project reached its goals in less that six months, says Emanuele Pierucci, CEO of Pierucci Agricoltura. And it became a new revenue stream for the company.