SMART Dairy Farming: Applications, challenges and future prospects
Scheduled for: Friday, September 23rd, 2022 at 11:00 EET
By: Mariska Van der Voort
Dr. Mariska van der Voort is an assistant professor in the field of data driven economic decision making in the livestock production chain at the Business Economics Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She holds a degree in Animal Sciences from Wageningen University and a Ph. D. in Applied Biological Sciences from Ghent University, Belgium. As a PhD and later as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Wageningen University, Mariska worked on different research project in the domain of agricultural economics, animal health and production economics, farm management, and decision support. As an assistant professor she tries to understand the value of information of data-driven applications for the livestock value chain. Key challenges in her research are to understand the (economic) value of precision technologies at farm level and other actors up- and downstream the livestock value chain, strategies and management, how to improve farm management decisions based on data, and determine the economic potentials of early disease prediction. As a lecture she teaches different courses at Wageningen University in relation to Business Economics and the use of Big Data in business decision.
Precision farming and AI as front-runners towards a more sustainable agriculture
Scheduled for: Saturday, September 24th, 2022 at 9:30 EET
By: Spyros Fountas
Dr. Spyros Fountas is Associate Professor in Agricultural Engineering at Agricultural University of Athens and Editor-in-Chief in the ELSEVIER journal Smart Agricultural Technology. He holds an MSc from Cranfield University UK in Information Technology, and PhD from Copenhagen University, Denmark in Systems Analysis on Precision Agriculture. He was also Visiting Scholar at Purdue University, USA. He has been Keynote speaker in several conferences among others in the FIRA Conference on Agricultural Robotics in France 2021; International Horticultural Congress in Turkey in 2018, 17th European Weed Research Society (EWRS), in France in June 2015; European Conference on Precision Agriculture (ECPA) in Spain in 2013. He has coordinated 3 H2020 projects, Smart-AKIS, GATES and currently OPTIMA on optimised Integrated Pest Management for precise detection and control of plant diseases. He is also participating in 15 other H2020 funded projects. He has 130 papers, including book chapters, journal papers and conference papers and 5200 citations (Google scholar, April 2022).
The Cool Farm Biodiversity metric: an evidence-based online tool to report and improve biodiversity management at farm scale
Scheduled for: Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 at 17:00 EET
By: Lynn Dicks
Dr Lynn Dicks is a Lecturer in Animal Ecology at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge. She is a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellow, a Fellow of Selwyn College and leads the Agroecology Research Group in the Zoology Department. She is the scientific lead for the Cool Farm Biodiversity Tool, and a member of the Science Advisory Council for the Cool Farm Alliance. She was a Co-ordinating Lead Author of the IPBES Thematic assessment of pollinators, pollination and food production and has authored over 80 scientific publications on insect conservation, agricultural biodiversity and evidence-based conservation in agricultural landscapes. She has a degree from Oxford University in Biological Sciences (1995) and a PhD from Cambridge University (2002) on the ecology of flower-visiting insects. From 2002-2009, she worked as a science writer and science communications adviser. From 2016-2019 she was based at the University of East Anglia, where she holds an Honorary Readership.