Io Coltivo Italia, an app that allows to adopt a vegetable garden and control it remotely

Io Coltivo Italia: adopt a vegetable garden remotely

Not everyone has the opportunity to take care of a home crop, and in city centres high levels of pollution discourage those who want to be sure that they are consuming healthy products. The solution? Choose your fruit and vegetable suppliers well, or adopt a remote vegetable garden. It was from this idea (common to several Italian companies, but so far implemented on an experimental level) that the Io Coltivo Italia associative project was born, a way to enhance the agricultural excellence of Italy through the intelligent use of technology. Thanks to a smartphone app, in fact, users can access a network of cameras that show in real time the image of growing plants in the most suitable areas of the Peninsula. Plus, after checking all the stages, from sowing to harvesting, users can choose whether to receive the crops from their virtual plot at home or collect at the associated points of sale. A sort of Truman Show applied to fruit and vegetables, to offer consumers the advantage of tracking them and being 100% aware of the food they bring to the table.

The farming project Io Coltivo Italia

Io Coltivo Italia is based in Lazio, in the town of Sabaudia, and was born from the idea of entrepreneur Michele Ferraro, who a few years ago decided to start collaborations with certified farms in various Italian regions: in addition to the crops in the Agro Pontino area, therefore, the fruit and vegetable supply chain also includes land in Cilento and Sicily, where the products grow in highly specialized greenhouses. Vegetables follow the cycle of nature, so customers have always different varieties available, from tomatoes to Sicilian tarocco oranges. Those who wish can moreover adopt an olive tree.

Just sign up on the Io Coltivo Italia website to join and receive an ICI card, sent directly to your home (with this card you are entitled to a 20% discount on food purchases in direct sales stores, if you do not want to take advantage of the delivery service). Once the registration is complete, the digital system randomly assigns to the recipients a plot of 50 square meters connected to surveillance cameras, which also capture the stock of goods and transmit all the images to a smartphone app. From this moment on, the adoption lasts for one year and can be renewed whenever you want.

Bludev Tech: the fingerprint for vegetables

Not just video surveillance systems: there is more. In fact, one of the project partners, together with the food company Foodrama, is Farzatitech, a company that created a traceability system that binds companies and consumers hand in hand. Each product has unique characteristics from an organic point of view: why not identify it with something similar to our fingerprint? Thus was born Bludev, a technology that, thanks to a portable device for scanning plants, “photographs” their molecular composition, transforming it into a real digital fingerprint (Bio Finger Print). The detector can be used without use of chemicals, so it’s not for the vegetables, on the contrary: its task is to transmit their ID card, with all the necessary information, to the blockchain (a digital block register that stores the supply chain). Simply put, by adopting these remote gardens we have the guarantee that they are grown in compliance with the rules of hygiene, health, work and the opportunity to "spy on them" day by day, in order to check the progress of their growth. Almost like planting a vegetable garden in your own back yard.

Io Coltivo Italia – Sabaudia, Via Pontina Km 97500 – Terracina 04019 (LT) – Tel: 07731852248 / 3479142048 – [email protected]

To register and download the app, visit the website iocoltivoitalia.org

by Lucia Facchini