Martin McNamara

Project Title: Smart Farming on rural farms demonstrating benefits to the wider agri-food community and co-creating new food products and services

Project Overview: Farming is the mainstay of rural areas, as employment income from this sector directly benefits the locality. The integration of farming enterprises with related value chains, such as agri-tourism or food tourism has positive cumulative effects. This WS project works within the PLOUTOS H2020 project, engaging in participatory extension in the community to support multi-actor collaboration; to embed information generated from use of on-farm sensors into diverse value chains, enhancing the sustainability of farms. Smart farming technologies have the ability to contribute to agricultural sustainability through targeted precision of inputs based on site specific needs and context (Kernecker et al.,2020). While the ability is present there is much literature to suggest that farmers do not adopt the vast majority of such systems (Ascough and Deer-Ascough, 1994; Cox, 1996; Parker, 1999; Ascough et al., 2002; Stephens and Middleton, 2002). To overcome the issues with the adoption of technologies it is important to identify and understand the problems in order to propose solutions. Martin’s study will implement a participatory action research, multi-actor approach to engage all relevant stakeholders in an attempt to understand what makes smart farming technologies useful from an end users’ perspective.

Supervisors: 

Dr. Aine Macken Walsh/Barry Caslin Teagasc

Dr. Monica Gorman (UCD)

Dr Joe Gutierrez (Teagasc)

Location: Listowel

Presentation: Martin McNamara RT1 (PDF)