Bringing the Data Economy to Thessaly's Fields: How DS2 is Transforming Precision Agriculture

Thessaly is Greece's breadbasket, a region where millions of hectares of farmland produce cotton, wheat, and vegetables that feed the country. Yet farmers here still make critical decisions about irrigation, pest control, and harvesting with incomplete information, relying on intuition or fragmented data spread across incompatible systems.

The DS2 project is changing that. By connecting the DigiAgro dataspace, operated by the University of Thessaly, with the AgroScience dataspace of AI specialist CROWNEST, DS2 creates a secure, federated data-sharing infrastructure that turns raw sensor readings into actionable intelligence. IoT devices deployed directly in Thessaly's fields capture real-time soil moisture, humidity, temperature, and crop imagery with data flowing through the DS2 platform to power AI models that generate personalised irrigation schedules, pest warnings, and yield predictions, all delivered to farmers through the AgroNIT platform in an accessible, mobile-friendly format.

The immediate practical benefits are already visible from Phase I of the project. The Daily Irrigation Scheduler, an automated workflow that pulls live sensor data and satellite metrics, estimates crop water needs, and alerts agronomists when thresholds are crossed. This directly addresses Thessaly's most pressing resource challenge: water scarcity. The region faces increasing drought pressure, and precision irrigation guided by real data rather than calendar rules, can translate to significant reductions in water and fertiliser consumption while maintaining or improving yields.