Sustainable Water Management in an Evolving Tomato Cultivation Testbed

Nowadays traditional agricultural irrigation practices present significant challenges for both sustainability and productivity, resulting in excessive water consumption—70% of the world’s water consumption is dedicated to agricultural irrigation—and inefficient resource management. The adoption of innovative solutions and technologies to support smart agriculture applications allows to overcome these problems and improve the productivity in terms of crop yield, fruits quality, efficiency, resource management, and waste reduction. Guided by these goals, this work examines the activities carried out within the NextGenerationEU-funded AGRITECH project in an evolving tomato cultivation testbed. The evaluation has been conducted for two consecutive years, namely, 2023 and 2024, with the deployment of Internet of Things devices and the support of the Agriware cloud platform. In particular, the automated irrigation system deployed during the second year of experimentation allowed for more precise and efficient irrigation scheduling with respect to that of the first year (manually managed). In fact, 0.13 m3 of water per square mater have been saved, while the water use efficiency improved by 22.2%, considering the global yield, thanks to the revised automated system. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of on-field automated irrigation processes, allowing to reduce the water consumption, increasing the accuracy, and improving the efficiency, if compared to manually managed irrigations. Overall, the experimental findings clearly highlight that a fully automated decision support system could enhance agricultural practices by enabling more precise resource management and by reducing water waste and farmers’ workload.