Applied Farming Network

Our innovation laboratory has the aim to achieve enhancements for the daily practice. In the wake of this, the first step is to understand and describe all different processes and operations as precisely as possible before intervening and changing them in a controlled fashion. At the experimental sites of BOKU (Groß Enzersdorf) and Vetmeduni (VetFarm, Kremesberg), the DILAAG project’s doctoral candidates and other researchers can use a variety of opportunities to design their experiments.

The Applied Farming Network serves as a platform to interconnect universities and practical farms to guarantee an intense exchange of information between agricultural practice and scientific research. Our interests focus on practicality-oriented research and the application of new technologies in agriculture and food production. Co-operating experimental farms offer optimal test environments for application-oriented research. In consultation with the practical farms, it is possible to perform experiments on their sites to review new technologies on their practicability and user-friendliness. This should facilitate a seamless transition of new technologies into agricultural practice. The experimental farms can profit directly from the on-site findings by recognizing and implementing improvements and new developments.

These practical research environments can also collect real-life data, later to be used for computational analysis, e.g., machine learning, to further boost research in this area.

Both crop farmers and animal farmers are part of the Applied Farming Network. Most importantly, these experimental farms have a willingness to cooperate with universities and researchers. Also, many of these farms can already provide technologies to be used for research and are enthusiastic about new and innovative ideas. Further, they are motivated to test and develop new technologies alongside researchers.