=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3293/paper28
|storemode=property
|title=Increasing the Use of Big Data via Agricultural Cooperatives - Abstract
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3293/paper28.pdf
|volume=Vol-3293
|authors=Matteo Cresti
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/Cresti22
}}
==Increasing the Use of Big Data via Agricultural Cooperatives - Abstract==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3293/paper28.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Increasing the Use of Big Data via Agricultural Cooperatives -
Abstract
Matteo Cresti 1
1
    University of Turin, Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, Via Sant’Ottavio 20, Turin, 10124, Italy


                 Summary
                 The talk aims to find strategies to defend small and medium farms and to find a way to make
                 them productive and technologically updated. Technological and IT innovation in agriculture
                 is an excellent opportunity to improve many conditions and solve some problems. In particular,
                 through Big Data, it is possible to increase the knowledge of correlations between events,
                 places, and crops and thus improve the quality and quantity of production. Large companies
                 have implemented these technologies: the cases of Monsanto and Ferrero are well known. The
                 agricultural systems of some European states, such as Italy, are strongly characterized by small
                 farms (according to the Italian Statistical Institute, the average size of farms is 8.4 hectares).
                 Often these companies are in intense competition because they are part of a territory famous
                 for a specific type of product (event increased by labels as PDO or PGI). Similarly, the average
                 age of Italian farmers is high (in Italy, more than half of agricultural entrepreneurs are older
                 than 50 years old). These factors (small size of the company, strong competitiveness between
                 neighboring companies, and high age) increase the risk of artificial intelligence under-use in
                 agriculture.
                 Part of the mistrust is due to issues concerning privacy and business secrecy. IT companies or
                 universities working on innovation in agriculture ask agricultural companies to make their data
                 available or make it public (Open Data) to be able to correlate or find causal links between
                 various phenomena. Farms, however, are often reluctant to do so in order not to share
                 information that could benefit their competitors. They do not find an advantage for them to
                 contribute to creating innovative and advantageous tools with a very high cost that they would
                 not be able to use, devices that are likely to be used only by multinationals or large companies.
                 A solution to this problem could be encouraging the transition from medium-small to medium-
                 large farms. However, this has two side effects: on the one hand, it changes the traditional
                 agricultural organization of some European states. On the other hand, having small businesses
                 firmly anchored to the enhancement of their territory has the positive effect of protecting the
                 environment, its health, its landscape, and its history.
                 The solution to this impasse is to encourage the construction of agricultural cooperatives,
                 consortia, or inter-company organizations linked to a territory. This system, which has already
                 been in use in many parts of Europe for more than half a century, and which has strong links
                 in local history, can be the bearer of the transition to information technology by encouraging
                 its members to share data among themselves to projects for the protection of the territory,
                 enhancement of products and increase in profitability and product quality. The Data should be
                 shared following a pact of purpose, and the results should be equally accessible to all parties.
                 The cooperative could purchase high-cost technology products jointly and use them alternately.
                 In this way, two objectives could be achieved: the protection of the territory and the
                 development of new agricultural technologies.

                 Keywords 1
                 Small farm, politics of agricultural systems, rural development



Proceedings of HAICTA 2022, September 22–25, 2022, Athens, Greece
EMAIL: matteo.cresti@unito.it
ORCID: 0000-0002-2196-0583
              ©️ 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
              Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
              CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)




                                                                                   134

</pre>