Ing. Miloš Ulman, Ph.D., participated as a representative of the PEF Department of Information Technologies (DIT) in the opening project meeting, which took place in a hybrid form in Pisa, Italy, on December 13-14, 2022. Horizont Europe project Maximizing the CO-benefits of agricultural Digitalization through conducive digital ECoSystems (CODECS) implemented by 33 organizations led by the Italian University of Pisa.

Officially launched on 1 October 2022, the project aims to increase the motivation and capacity of European farmers to use digitization as a means of enabling sustainable and transformative change. The aim of the project is to improve the ability to understand, evaluate and predict the full range of benefits and costs related to the digitization of farms and to build digital ecosystems that maximize the benefits of digitization.

CODECS aims to:

• create and deliver information on the costs and benefits of digital technologies – assessed at different scales and in real life – to farmers, advisors and policy makers
• research and create conditions for increasing the capacities of farmers and rural communities to use them
• create recommendations for local government and policy makers to support agricultural digital technologies leading to sustainable development.

The project, which will run for four years until September 2026, will build on the results of the project DESIRA and you so profit. CODECS includes 21 Living Labs spread across Europe. As part of the project, a pan-European one will be established Knowledge Accelerator formed by the science-policy interface, the AKIS network and the demo farm network.

In CODECS, DIT participates in activities aimed at evaluating the economic costs and benefits of digital technologies and digital ecosystems in agriculture at the farm level, as well as in developing tools for evaluating the impacts of digital technologies.