About us

Our mission

To foster sustainable and efficient food production AgrifoodTEF empowers innovators with validation tools needed to bridge the gap between their brightest ideas and successful market products.

Built as a network of physical and digital facilities across Europe, the project provides services that help assess and validate third party AI and Robotics solutions in real-world conditions aiming to maximise impact from digitalisation of the agricultural sector.

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Both in Flanders and in Europe, artificial intelligence (AI) must become the driving force behind the digital transformation of the private and public sectors. In that context, the AgrifoodTEF wants to strengthen and accelerate this much-needed digital transformation in an important sector such as Agrifood at the Flemish and European levels, ensuring that we produce food sustainably, affordably, efficiently and competitively to the highest standards.

Within the Flemish AgrifoodTEF, we focus on the whole chain from farmer to plate, from the primary sector, livestock farming, arable farming, horticulture, up to and including the food sector in Flanders where we support small and medium-sized enterprises. Beyond that, we also focus on digital infrastructure where we try to combine our datasets with the growing agricultural data sector.

To this end, the Flemish agrifoodTEF has six specific, and achievable objectives:

  1. Makes "state of the art" infrastructure available, combined with world-class - top expertise, where state-of-the-art methods for testing AI and AI driven robotics solutions can be developed and applied.
  2. Provides services to all technology providers in Flanders and beyond to test, certify and validate AI, data and robotics solutions.
  3. Promote trust and adoption among Flemish end users by accelerating the rollout of reliable, mature, and validated AI, data, and robotics solutions to the Flemish market.
  4. Create trust among technology providers using agrifoodTEF services.
  5. Expand and strengthen network to reach the entire European market together with the other satellites and nodes.
  6. Develop end-user driven use cases and associated methodologies to include smaller farms and SMEs, with a specific focus on the affordability of AI solutions.

AgrifoodTEF is embedded in ILVO's organization which means it can rely on the extensive and multidisciplinary expertise of more than 700 employees with specific knowledge about agriculture and nutrition. To achieve these core tasks, the AgrifoodTEF relies on ILVO's infrastructure and expertise. More than 200 ha of trial fields, 15,000 m² of trial greenhouses, 20,000 m² of trial stables and a workshop for prototyping are available in addition to more than 40 accredited labs and the Food Pilot (a food pilot plant). This infrastructure is used to design, develop, evaluate and demonstrate new, data-driven technology in practice.

AgrifoodTEF can draw on an extensive network of stakeholders. This network includes farmers, food companies, practice and research centers, knowledge institutions, innovation hubs, policy makers, as well as technology companies and supply industry. This expertise and infrastructure combined with the extensive network of agri-food stakeholders enables a qualitative, highly multidisciplinary approach. This is how AgrifoodTEF helps innovation in the Flemish agri-food sector move forward with you!

Did you know that there are five domain living labs active within ILVO with which we collaborate intensively? Click here for more information