Smart viticulture for sustainable agriculture: a digitally equipped future for rural areas and beyond

The aim of this paper is to present developed solutions of the use of new IoT and other digital technologies in agriculture as well as in viticulture, concretely a digital platform for winegrowers. The platform, based on the concept of the “smart vineyards’’ will in-troduce common environmental approaches to reduce the burden of agriculture on the environment, providing lower production costs compared to conventional processing in the range of 20-30%, optimizing labor costs, the costs of using water resources for irrigation, the use of fertilizers and plant protection products, introducing more sustai-nable, long-term solutions. By mainly working with the winegrowers from rural areas, various uses of digital tools are being introduced, however in close relation to stakehol-ders from bussiness, reserach and knowledge institutions to public represtantatives. The paper presents the first development stage of the digital platform.