Intellectual Outcome 1 aimed to build a general state-of-art overview about the ICT uptake of agricultural companies in Macedonia and in Hungary, the present level of Agriculture 4.0 relative to the EU trend, and about the offer and demand in the agricultural workforce with special focus on the digital competences of the workers.
An extensive analysis of the state of the art in use of ICT in agriculture and precision farming was conducted im each target country as well as on the level of EU. These analyses serve as a baseline for following parts of the project. Additionally, a survey was devised to get relevant information directly at the source – from local farmers and representatives of agricultural enterprises.
A survey was conducted among farmers from target countries. Apart from getting basic background information about the respondents (type of farm, size, number of employees etc.), the main goal was to ascertain the level of knowledge about ICT tools and precision farming methods among the farmers and its level of utilization. In Hungary, 64 representatives of agricultural enterprises took part in the survey, while in Macedonia it was only 11 respondents.
The results of the first part of the survey shown that the selected participants were representative to the overall structure of agriculture in a given country (in terms of size of arable land, number of employees etc.)
Both Hungary and Macedonia have shown good results in terms of overall awareness about ICT, with Hungary having higher percentage of users replying that they are actively utilizing ICT in their business. However in both countries the majority of users feel that they do not utilize ICT to its fullest potential.
In this area, the two target countries differ the most. While in Hungary, decent number of respondents answered, that they are already utilizing at least some of the precision farming methods (and those who did not were at least aware of them), in Macedonia the results is this section were recognizably worse. While the amount of users that are familiar with precision farming was decent (even though lower than in Hungary), the number of companies currently actively utilizing precision agriculture was very low.
This project is funded by the European Community Erasmus programme.
