eSmallFarmer: Improving of Rural Agriculture

The introduction of concepts such as IoT or cloud computing is increasingly common nowadays, in different sectors of activity where the agricultural sector is not an exception. The use of drones for pesticide application in pest control, or even the use of sensor networks to control the growth of crops, are quite common in the context of Agriculture 4.0. However, this technological advance does not happen at the same speed in remote regions where traditional agriculture is still dominant. These differences even contribute to increasing the gap between urban regions, where modernized agriculture predominates, and rural areas, are still strongly rooted in traditional agriculture. In addition to these technological differences, there are still major differences regarding access to market outlets, where the pandemic COVID-19 further aggravated the situation. Given the measures to contain the pandemic, which has resulted in the closure of virtually all services (for example, butchers and small markets), many of the small producers have been left without their only means of disposal, which has contributed strongly to the weakening of small agriculture. To mitigate the differences between the rural and urban areas, but also to mitigate the negative impacts caused by the pandemic COVID-19, the need for new livestock/business models was raised to create conditions to allow producers, in regions with low population density, access markets that until now were impossible. This paper presents a viable business model that contributes to reduce the differences between urban and rural environments, as well as, mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in this sector.