Products

Applications

Technologies

Support

Press Area

Company

2014  January the 1st

On January the 1st 2014 the new directive on the sustainable use of pesticides in agriculture shall enter into force for all EU member states.
The Governments of the Member States must adjust to time such provisions, following the indications of Europe. 
This directive is aimed at introducing a more conscious crop management and applying chemicals according to the paradigm of the field need fields rather than the calendar.
To achieve this goal, monitoring system will be introduces in the field to decide when and how to intervene and actually demonstrate the real need to use the pesticide.

The Directive

The cited European directive is DECISION No1600/2002/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 22 July 2002 laying down the Sixth Community Environment Action environment, which can be downloaded in various languages at the following link:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32002D1600:EN:NOT

Here are some highlights:

[...] The program is designed to ensure a high degree of protection to the environment and to the human health and a general improvement to environment and quality of life: it indicates the priority for the Environmental Strategy for Sustainable Development [...]

[...] We need a better understanding of potential adverse effects arising from the use of chemicals and the responsibility for the development of knowledge should be placed on producers, importers and downstream users. [...]

[...] Pesticides should be used in a sustainable manner in order to minimize negative impact on human health and the environment. Progress towards achieving the environmental objectives must be measured and evaluated. [...]

The role of precision agriculture.

The new legislation is a natural ally of precision agriculture, understood primarily as a deep knowledge of the territory and of cultivation requirements.
Making precision agriculture means clearly discriminating the different needs related to individual crops in different times and under specific environmental conditions and it represent the first step toward sustainable agriculture.
It is clear that any new behaviour tended to be more efficient, more environmentally friendly, or more sustainable, bases on territory knowledge and study.
A monitoring system is certainly one of the many useful and necessary tools to combine, agronomic studies and a set of information related to actual field conditions and to the microclimate.

Why using VineSense and not a traditional weather station.

VineSense is designed to enhance and record differences within a plot.
The differences in temperature and humidity are so small that can appear insignificant for the defence purposes and therefore an average figure recorded in any point of the field could be mistakenly believed as indicative for all areas.
In fact these small changes can lead to having the dew on the leaves and have suitable thermal conditions for the development of diseases.
VineSense can then control these risky parameters and allows the field to act with greater awareness,applying treatments when and where necessary.
VineSense does not provide an overall average of the measured parameters, but records and highlights the differences in individual areas, so as to calculate risk models of diseases individually for each sensor in the field.
Placing a sensor in the middle of the field means choosing to put a sensor exactly where needed and where it can provide data with correct meaning: it is useless to monitor temperature and humidity out of the row, since climatic conditions are very different and a weather station can not go beyond the head pole of the row.

Highlights

E-mail