Liguria Region Launches Innovative Olive Farming Project with AI and Smart Sensors

Summary

The Liguria region in Italy is fund­ing an exper­i­men­tal project to enhance olive farm­ing using new tech­no­log­i­cal archi­tec­ture, includ­ing smart sen­sors and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. The project aims to pro­vide grow­ers with valu­able insights and advice based on real-time soil and plant data, poten­tially rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity in tra­di­tional olive groves. The ini­tia­tive also includes the use of large aer­ial drones to apply treat­ments to olive trees more sus­tain­ably and effi­ciently, with hopes of influ­enc­ing Italian and European law­mak­ers to cre­ate reg­u­la­tions for drone use in agri­cul­ture.

The Liguria region in north­west­ern Italy is financ­ing an 18-month exper­i­men­tal project to opti­mize olive farm­ing through new tech­no­log­i­cal archi­tec­ture.

Based on a net­work of smart sen­sors that detect real-time soil and plant con­di­tions in olive orchards, the sys­tem will use arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to inter­pret the data and pro­vide grow­ers with valu­able insights and advice.

Liguria is home to more than 740,000 olive trees and dozens of cul­ti­vars. The region’s flag­ship prod­uct is the high-qual­ity Riviera Ligure PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) extra vir­gin olive oil.

“This exper­i­ment is the result of a part­ner­ship among sev­eral local pub­lic and pri­vate enti­ties involved in devel­op­ing advanced tech­nolo­gies in engi­neer­ing, IT and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions,” Federico Tinivella, project leader at the pub­licly-owned Center for Agricultural Experimentation and Assistance (CeRSAA), told Olive Oil Times.

“They are all experts in sen­sor tech­nolo­gies and in enabling dif­fer­ent sen­sors to com­mu­ni­cate with each other,” he added.

According to the project’s pro­mot­ers, some of the inno­va­tion lies in trans­fer­ring to olive farm­ing a range of tech­nolo­gies already used to mon­i­tor and improve the effi­ciency of indus­trial processes.

These include famil­iar tools such as weather sta­tions for track­ing envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions in the field, though oth­ers are more advanced.

“One smart ther­mome­ter is placed in an ele­vated posi­tion where it can read the infrared radi­a­tion of the olive tree canopy and detect leaf tem­per­a­ture,” Tinivella said. ​“That indi­rectly indi­cates the poten­tial water stress the plant is expe­ri­enc­ing.”

Other sen­sors focus on soil con­di­tions, ana­lyz­ing the per­cent­age of nutri­ents such as nitro­gen, phos­pho­rus and potas­sium.

“They also mea­sure oxy­gen lev­els in the soil, which pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion, for exam­ple, to mon­i­tor the health of the tree’s root sys­tem,” Tinivella said.

One sen­sor detects the amount of water on olive tree leaves. Another sen­sor being devel­oped for the project focuses on iden­ti­fy­ing par­a­sites, such as the olive fruit fly, and also serves as a smart trap.

“It will attract the fruit fly and will be able to iden­tify it. Once the AI sys­tem has been trained, it will rec­og­nize the insect and alert us to its pres­ence,” Tinivella said.

Other smart sen­sors are designed to track fungi pres­ence and oth­ers to deter wild boars from enter­ing the orchards.

Given the moun­tain­ous nature of the Ligurian land­scape, many olive groves are located on ter­races, which are con­stantly threat­ened by wild boars that dig up the orchards and dam­age the ter­race walls.

“Essentially, it is a photo trap that detects the ani­mals and emits loud, con­stantly vary­ing sounds,” Tinivella said. ​“Since the sounds change every time they blast, the boars are unable to rec­og­nize them, mak­ing the noise an effec­tive deter­rent.”

Specific sen­sors also mon­i­tor air qual­ity in the field, such as the pres­ence and con­cen­tra­tion of car­bon diox­ide.

Others are being devel­oped to detect and mea­sure spe­cific sub­stances in the soil.

“One exam­ple is Katerina, a gamma-ray spec­trom­e­ter,” Tinivella said. ​“This instru­ment uses tech­niques that detect atomic behav­ior and ana­lyze spe­cific spec­tra. The goal is to deter­mine, for instance, how much potas­sium is in the soil.”

This tech­nol­ogy is being installed in an olive orchard asso­ci­ated with Riviera Ligure PDO pro­duc­tions.

The arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence plat­form ana­lyzes the data com­ing from the field and presents it on the grower’s dash­board. This data can become a com­pre­hen­sive deci­sion sup­port sys­tem.

“By train­ing the AI engine, the sys­tem will be able to offer use­ful advice to the grower,” Tinivella said. ​“The sys­tem will alert us when cer­tain con­di­tions occur that may require a deci­sion.”

Examples include irri­gat­ing the trees when water stress is detected or apply­ing fer­til­iza­tion treat­ments tai­lored to the soil and plant con­di­tions.

“This project can def­i­nitely help improve the out­look for Ligurian olive pro­duc­tion,” said Giorgio Lazzaretti, con­sor­tium direc­tor for pro­tect­ing Riviera Ligure PDO extra vir­gin olive oil.

“It’s not the only ini­tia­tive. We’re also exper­i­ment­ing with drones to main­tain olive groves, a project we’re con­duct­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Lombardy’s regional insti­tu­tions,” he added.

The drone project explores the use of large aer­ial drones to apply tar­geted treat­ments to olive trees.

This tech­nol­ogy could eas­ily be inte­grated into the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence plat­form being devel­oped.

“The exper­i­ment will con­tinue through­out 2025 and will also focus on com­bat­ing olive fruit fly infes­ta­tions,” Lazzaretti said.

“In an ini­tial test, the olive orchard was mapped, and then the drone could auto­mat­i­cally move from one tree to another to apply treat­ments,” he added.

These aer­ial drones can carry heavy loads and oper­ate more sus­tain­ably and quickly than tra­di­tional meth­ods, regard­less of ter­rain.

“What we’ve seen is that when a drone treats a plant, its rotors push the sub­stances exactly where they need to go, dras­ti­cally reduc­ing drift,” Tinivella remarked.

“The biggest issue with deploy­ing this tech­nol­ogy is the com­plex bureau­cracy sur­round­ing drone use,” Lazzaretti said. ​“A large amount of paper­work is already required just to carry out the exper­i­ments.”

These smart drones can deliver treat­ments very quickly. 

“We’ve seen from early tri­als that they can cover hectares of olive groves in just min­utes,” he said. ​“And of course, they can also eas­ily access the more dif­fi­cult areas of the groves, espe­cially in moun­tain­ous regions.”

“We can only hope that our results and the research behind them will encour­age Italian and European law­mak­ers to draft reg­u­la­tions specif­i­cally for the use of aer­ial drones in agri­cul­ture,” Lazzaretti added.

According to the project pro­mot­ers, com­bin­ing drone tech­nol­ogy with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and an expand­ing net­work of smart sen­sors could rev­o­lu­tion­ize pro­duc­tiv­ity in tra­di­tional olive groves. 

This would be a cru­cial devel­op­ment for Italian olive farm­ing, which is deeply rooted in tra­di­tional grow­ing meth­ods.