The Farmanager® platform solves the problem of digital transformation for agri-food businesses that farm goats and sheep for milk production and wish to reduce their carbon footprint while maximizing their production in a "green" way. The platform follows the SaaS (Software as a service) model and consists of a cloud-based farm management information system fed with data drawn from sensors of an integrated IoT (Internet of Things) system and an information system for mathematical processing of pollutant values produced by the farm's operations (LCA). The operating mode of the platform will be ISO certified.

The benefit for platform users and customers is real-time monitoring and management of automated farm and livestock operations, maximum milk production by creating a nutrition and medication plan per animal or group of animals, calculation of nutrition and medication costs and other elastic and inelastic farm costs in order to minimize them. An important benefit is the use of all of the above to certify the carbon footprint of the business by independent bodies so that they can benefit from public or European programmes or even the emissions exchanges. At the same time, the platform offers DSS (Decision Support System) services, in order to provide consulting services through the large amount of data collected from each farm, with the aim of optimizing the productivity of each farm and continuously reducing its carbon footprint.

It was found after market research in Greece, Albania, North Macedonia and Bulgaria that a similar platform for maximizing dairy production on a sheep and goat farm does not exist. The innovation of the Farmanager® platform compared to other existing livestock farm monitoring platforms lies primarily in the fact of the certified measurement of the carbon footprint of sheep and goat farm operations in an automated way. The carbon footprint is measured as a calendar report, overall, for the reporting system [farm - feed production - farm management - animals]. At the same time it is foreseen that the carbon footprint can be measured per unit of milk equivalent. The calculations carried out in order to measure the carbon footprint follow the IPCC protocol (ref.2019) at Tier 2 ( in the future also Tier 3) and up to Scope 3.

The Farmanager® platform was created by the “Microprocessor-Microcontroller, Electronic Systems for Automatic Control and Robotics” research laboratory of the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Western Macedonia in collaboration with the Agricultural Cooperative of Cereals and Livestock Products of Kastoria.