March the 5th, 2024 – The Croatian Digital Village project (Digitalno selo) has been presented, which aims to showcase how digitisation can work alongside agriculture in a way that benefits everyone.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Josipa Ban writes, a truly unique project for the development of a digital, or smart village, was launched not long ago in the Strizivojna Municipality, in overlooked and heavily agricultural eastern Croatia. The goal of the Croatian Digital Village project is to help Croatian farmers get to know each other, start using digital tools to increase their overall productivity, and be more competitive in an increasingly demanding field (no pun intended).
In this small municipality in Osijek-Baranja County, the Croatian Digital Village project was first presented. It is a smart and digital village development project that will be implemented practice, for the first time ever in Croatia, in Strizivojna in cooperation with various partners. The target group is of course – farmers, and the idea is to show and prove the importance of the digitisation of agriculture and the introduction of new IT technologies in agricultural production with one quality example and project.
“We can comfortably expect the Croatian Digital Village project to reveal another side of digitisation to local farmers that they definitely haven’t seen before. Although in practice our farmers do use certain digital tools, we believe that they could do better and use more of them. Additionally, this project is extremely important to us because it also has a social component and affects the development of Croatian agriculture. Our goal, therefore, is to improve business and agricultural production in Strizivojna through it and to encourage the creation of new jobs”, said Josip Jakobović, Mayor of the Municipality of Strizivojna, stressing that he hopes that thanks to this project, he will be able to retain young people in Strizivojna. He added that the Croatian Digital Village project will not only focus on farmers, but will also include the local “Bajka” Kindergarten and Ivana Brlić Mažuranić Elementary School.
Strizivojna is an area few in Croatia have heard of, let alone outside of it. Located in the chronically overlooked eastern part of the country, about 2,500 inhabitants live there and approximately 15 family farms operate there. 99 percent of them are engaged in the production of beef cattle, and between 1,000 and 1,300 animals are raised in the municipality. The farmers living in the Municipality of Strizivojna have about 1500 hectares of land at their disposal.
Antun Degmečić, a 21-year-old farmer from Strizivojna, is looking forward to participating in the Croatian Digital village project. Agricultural production has been a passion for this young farmer since childhood, and he got involved in the Croatian Digital Village project precisely because he wants to learn how to use new digital tools in production. “I want this project to get started as soon as possible so we can all learn something new about digitisation in agriculture in cooperation with IT companies. I hope that this new knowledge will help me to improve and speed up my production”, said Degmečić, who is currently raising 150 cattle and cultivating 130 hectares of land.
The project was also supported by Marija Vučković, Minister of Agriculture, who emphasised the importance of digitisation in the development of domestic agriculture in Strizivojna and beyond it.
Through the Croatian Digital Village project, farmers should be able to see the benefits brought by digitisation, robotisation and artificial intelligence (AI). This should increase their investments as well as their general level of productivity.
In addition to the Strizivojna Municipality and Osijek-Baranja County, the partners in this praiseworthy project as the technology companies InfoDom and Digital Agro. The inclusion of other partners who offer digital solutions as well as scientific knowledge is still expected, and anyone who is interested can join.
