Information and communication technology (ICT) can help to detect animal health and welfare issues sooner as well as can help to increase the efficiency of milk and beef production, improve the farm and value chain management practices, and create new business opportunities and new business models. That means we need not only more but better quality data and improved access to data to provide new solutions for variety of stakeholders.<\/p>\n
However, the potential of ICT is not yet fully been utilized due to challenges such as data access, ownership and data interoperability; inadequate skills of different stakeholders issues and lack of suitable ready-made solutions for the end-users hindering the exchange of data along the value chain;<\/p>\n
The project SustainIT (Releasing the Potential of ICT for Sustainable Milk and Beef Cattle Value Chains) aims to:<\/p>\n
The project is implemented through the Living Labs established in each participating country, Estonia, Finland, Sweden and germany. The Living Lab approach assumes active involvement of users in each stage of research, development and innovation process. The SustainIT Living Labs will bring together dairy and beef value chain and ICT actors such as farmers, veterinarians, processing industry, retailers, consumers, policy makers, researchers, ICT developers, technology providers and innovation brokers. The multi-actor approach will ensure that the ICT challenges and experience of each stakeholder group are understood and will help to find solutions together that would meet the needs of all value chain stakeholders as well as consumers.<\/p>\n
The project SustainIT brings together consortium members with very specific expertise on technology, agri-food value chains, innovation management, governance and policy. With their unique national and transnational networks and knowledge, partners will complement each other expertise and help to explore ICT adoption in transnational context. Consortium members are Estonian Dairy Cluster and Estonian University of Life Sciences\u200b (Estonia), University of Oulu (Finland), Halmstad University (Sweden) and Technical University of Munich (Germany). ERA-NET Cofund ICT-AGRI-FOOD program project working period is three years and its budget 942 800 euros.<\/p>\n
“Digitalization and latter related activities are one of Estonian Dairy Cluster’s (EDC) top priorities. SustainIT fits well with other digitization activities such as establishment of automated solution for collecting bovine health data and mapping of the usage of multilateral data exchange or project beefEST. If we bring along other countries experience and knowledge and sharing our own we can do more” said Chairman of EDC, Hardi Tamm.<\/p>\n