Objectives of the Product

Cotton farm professionals encounter interconnected agronomic and financial challenges, including unpredictable crop health, pest infestations, water shortages, and fluctuating market prices. RESTART aims to directly tackle these challenges by providing:

• Crop Monitoring, Pest and Irrigation Alerts: by utilising Earth Observation (EO) and meteorological data, farmers obtain timely notifications regarding crop stress, pest development, and irrigation needs, enhancing field management practices.
• Yield Prediction: in-season AI models combine remote sensing and agronomic data to produce precise, location-specific yield projections.
• Financial Forecasting: analytics of the cotton market, along with predictive modeling and hedging strategies, enable farmers to optimise the timing of sales and safeguard profit margins.

RESTART inherits knowledge from previous ESA and EU-funded projects, effectively combining agronomic intelligence and financial forecasting within a scalable, tiered-subscription platform. The system is designed for wide accessibility, suiting both smallholders and large cooperatives.

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Customers and their Needs

RESTART targets smallholder cotton farmers, agricultural cooperatives and organisations and large agribusinesses. In cotton farming, it is common for one entity to manage everything from budgeting and input scheduling to production planning. These raise the need for practical, holistic insights—such as crop health alerts, irrigation needs, pest outbreaks predictions, and yield forecasts—to enhance productivity and reduce costs. The financial forecasting service provided by RESTART is essential, as customers usually lack knowledge in economics, trading and hedging strategies, leading to poor decisions regarding the crop market. In addition, individuals possess inadequate expertise in satellite and/or AI technology, emphasising the need for user-friendly and comprehensive dashboards and notifications. Consultants and traders will benefit from RESTART, as their roles need insightful, scalable tools to assist multiple farms or large agribusinesses.

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Targeted customer/users countries

Greece, Europe, scalable for global coverage.

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Product description

RESTART is an AI-driven decision support platform based on EO satellite imagery, real-time meteorological and market data. Its services include:

1. Crop Monitoring
2. Predictive Alerts for pest outbreaks
3. Predictive Alerts for water stress
4. Yield Forecasting using seasonally adaptive AI models
5. Financial Insights through cotton futures price forecasting and market insights.

RESTART stands as a first-of-its-kind platform due to its:

• Holistic cotton farm management, including the consolidation of agronomic and financial forecasting within a single platform.
• Advanced multi-parametric modelling, integrating a wide range of input data including EO, pest scouting, weather, historical yield data, soil moisture levels, financial markets’ data and other economic indicators.
• Proactive modelling, anticipating risk before onset.
• Scalable cloud architecture that accommodates both smallholders and large farms.
• User-centric interface that provides insights through web dashboards, alerts, and APIs.

Farmers engage via a platform that provides insightful dashboards, interactive visualisations, and alert configurations. The platform’s architecture consists of:

1. Data ingestion layer encompassing satellite, weather, and market APIs
2. Agronomic and financial processing modules (model training and forecasting)
3. Storage backend for time-series and historical data
4. Web and API services, including dashboards, visualisations, and alerting functionalities.

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Added Value

RESTART offers distinctive added value compared to existing AgriTech platforms through the following key differentiators:

1. Integrated Agronomic and Financial Intelligence into a Unified Platform

Unlike other platforms that focus exclusively on agronomic or financial advisory systems, RESTART uniquely combines satellite-derived agronomic risk models with AI-driven cotton price forecasting. This integration enables farmers to align field operations with financial decision-making in order to optimise cotton farm management.

2. Predictive Analytics Across Diverse Data Sources

RESTART utilises EO, weather, and financial datasets to improve essential agricultural and business operations, including crop monitoring, yield prediction, pest and irrigation alerts and cotton price forecasting. This AI-driven, multi-dimensional method surpasses single-focus tools by providing proactive, accurate insights that help professionals optimise both field performance and business outcomes.

3. Scalable and Accessible Service

RESTART provides scalable, cloud-based analytics through user-friendly web visualisations and automated alerts designed for both smallholders and large farms, enhancing decision-making promptness and adoption rates.

 4. Cost-Effective, Tiered Subscription Framework

RESTART offers a flexible pricing structure tailored for different cotton farm sizes, thereby democratising access to advanced analytics. This approach ensures affordability in contrast to high-cost competitor enterprise solutions, while maintaining high service value and return on investment.

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Current Status

The RESTART activity is currently in its De-risking Cycle (M1–M10).