At present and more so in the future, irrigated agriculture will take place under water scarcity. Insufficient water supply for irrigation will be the norm rather than the exception, and irrigation management will shift from emphasizing production per unit area towards maximizing the production per unit of water consumed, the water productivity. To cope with scarce supplies, Galpagro has developed and tested a Regulated Deficit Irrigation (RDI) protocol for the olive plant using the Scholander pressure chamber as a tool for estimating the plant tissues water potential. Thanks to our RDI irrigation system, the water restriction is limited to drought-tolerant stages, often the vegetative stages and the late ripening period. So, it makes possible the reduction of spent water up to 40 % without prejudicing the production and the quality of fruits. Furthermore, to enhance this novel irrigation system, we need to develop a continuous measurement sensor which will be able to replace the Scholander pressure chamber (discontinuous method). This sensor will make easier and more efficient the implementation of RDI protocol in olive tree and latter to other crops, and also, will reduce the overall costs. To date, there don’t exist in the market any method or sensor able to estimate in continuous the olive trunk water potential, which would make possible the integration of our RDI protocol immediately to the market. In this regard, Galpagro is collaborating with other specialized companies to develop the continuous-online sensor. Our target customers will be the individual farmers of any size and/or cooperatives who are willing to pay for a differentiate and effective irrigation system which will reduce them irrigation costs (water quantity), without prejudicing the production and fruit quality. This Feasibility Study’s goal is to deepen in those critical points to assess the economic, technical and commercial viability of HydSOS, to tackle this challenge for us to scale-up.

BOOST aims to boost agribusiness acceleration and digital hub networking by providing a sophisticated business training programme for the application of sustainable Precision Agriculture (PA) methodologies on management, entrepreneurship & marketing, networking, and digital transformation through new organizational models (agribusiness incubators/accelerators, access to digital hubs for extraversion and knowledge dissemination), by linking Higher Education (HE), Vocational Education and Training (VET), Research and Technological Development (RTD), Farmers and Associations in a common framework based on their real training needs in PA. The main advantages of BOOST are: a) the innovative approach of networking among HE, VET, RTD, Farmers and Students with real business incubators/accelerators and Agriculture 4.0 experts, b) the introduction to World Trade and Digital Information through EU Digital Hubs for the digital transformation of the primary sector & c) the PA profitability. BOOST aims to identify the training needs in PA, Digitalization and Business development, to fill the gap among research and practice and to build bridges between the traditional productive model and an innovative, sustainable, and entrepreneurial one. Students and young farmers will be trained as future agripreneurs and Agriculture 4.0 PA adopters, challenged by real experiences with Technological and Business development ecosystems and will interact with enterprises and farmers to identify the sector's problems and opportunities and to develop new business ideas and technologies. In the long run, the project outputs will create solid synergies between HE, VET and innovative agricultural enterprises and will eventually contribute to the efficient implementation of EU policies in agriculture, like boosting agricultural business development using Agriculture 4.0.

Problems related to biodiversity loss are seriously affecting the olive sector, one of the most important cultivars from the cultural and economic point of view. Emerging diseases and climate change effects daily threaten this sector. The last dry seasons have caused the decrease of olive oil production up to 57%. The genetic erosion risk is present: there are more than 1,200 olive varieties worldwide, but just a 5% represent the total harvested area. Olive GenRes could be the key to solve these problems, but they remain largely unexplored. Big handicaps still hinder their exploitation, such as poor characterisation of olive varieties, scarce development of pre-breeding activities, and lack of collaboration between the Germplasm Banks (GBs) and breeders/farmers. GEN4OLIVE encompasses a wide, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary consortium, which aims to leverage olive GenRes by bringing them to a higher level closer to breeders and markets. The overall goal of GEN4OLIVE is to accelerate the mobilization of olive GenRes and to foster pre-breeding activities by (1) developing a smart and user-friendly interface that will implement Artificial Intelligence utilities to leverage the olive GenRes resources; and (2) enhancing breeders and growers’ participation through the implementation of two open calls for supporting pre-breeding activities and breeding plans. GEN4OLIVE will develop collective pre-breeding activities aiming to in-depth characterize more than 500 worldwide varieties and 1000 wild and ancient genotypes around 5 topics: climate change, pests and diseases, production and quality, and modern planting systems. After integrating all results in the GEN4OLIVE interface, breeders and other end-users will have an effective tool for speeding up all kind of breeding programs. The combination of pre-breeding results with modern ICTs will enable the access of end-users to this valuable information.