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Sustainability is a concept that can be translated into: efficiency, data, traceability and, in the agricultural field, precision farming. It is with these four pillars that agricultural production, which is transformed into food, reduces its carbon footprint, reaping collateral but by no means secondary benefits, such as improved quality, cost control, risk control and a competitive advantage over foreign competitors. The collaboration between xFarm Technologies and Riso Gallo is one of the most ambitious and concrete projects of its kind. Agri-tech applied to the Italian rice supply chain. A product that, not everyone knows, is one of our country’s finest, both in terms of quality and quantity. This initiative demonstrates how digital innovation can be the real enabler of sustainable transition, even in complex crops such as rice, where agronomic, environmental and economic challenges are intertwined. And where sustainability, in order to be effective, needs tools that make it measurable, scalable and shareable.
A system project for the rice supply chain
The partnership between Riso Gallo, a historic Italian food company founded in 1856, and xFarm Technologies, a tech company (formerly a start-up) specialising in the digitalisation of agri-food supply chains, began in 2023 with a pilot project involving six farms and over 400 hectares of digitalised land. But it was in 2024 that the project really took off (20 farms and 1,600 hectares mapped), with the stated aim of extending the digital infrastructure to all of the more than 200 rice growers currently participating in the ‘Il Riso che Sostiene’ (Rice that Supports) programme.
The vision is clear: to transform sustainability into a concrete competitive advantage for farms that produce rice for the Gallo brand. And to do so through a tailor-made digital platform capable of integrating IoT sensors, field operation traceability, decision support systems (DSS), impact indicators and customised predictive models.
When sustainability is measured (and improved)
The project introduces two important innovations specific to rice cultivation:
- A sustainability indicator dedicated to rice cultivation, which measures the impact of agronomic practices, cultivated varieties and techniques used. A tool designed to guide farmers towards choices with a lower environmental impact, but also to certify results throughout the supply chain.
- A decision support system (DSS) for blast disease, one of the most aggressive fungal diseases affecting rice. Developed and calibrated for the varieties of interest to Riso Gallo, the system will help farmers optimise treatments, reducing the number of interventions, the use of plant protection products and the impact on the ecosystem.
Thanks to these tools, the platform not only improves business management, but also enables a new model of precision farming applied to rice cultivation, a crop that accounts for over 50% of European cereal production.
Data, training and engagement: the key to success
The project involves farmers in an alliance that goes beyond technology. To ensure its large-scale adoption, xFarm Technologies and Riso Gallo have set up a training programme for farmers, who are supported by agronomists at every stage of implementation. And, not least, the use of digital tools will be free for all participating farms, underlining Riso Gallo’s strategic commitment to promoting participatory, inclusive and sustainable agriculture.
“This is an ambitious project involving farmers from our community of sustainable farms, combining technology, technical efficiency and agronomic practices. This application offers numerous advantages. On the one hand, farms will have a tool that will enable them to manage their activities even more efficiently, while Riso Gallo will be able to collect primary, real data from the rice cultivation phase, calculate the carbon footprint and identify possible mitigation strategies,” emphasises Stefano Cavigiolo, breeder and sustainability manager. . “With xFarm, we are building a system that will allow us to assess the impact of the entire supply chain, in particular the carbon footprint that rice carries with it from the cultivation phase.”
xFarm and the vision beyond rice
For xFarm Technologies, the collaboration with Riso Gallo is yet another confirmation of the validity of a modular and adaptive approach, already successfully applied in over 100 countries, on more than four million hectares. But it is also an important step forward in a key sector of Italian agri-food production.
“xFarm is closely linked to rice cultivation, one of the first crops on which we developed our technologies. This ambitious project will help participating farmers improve agronomic management and sustainability, while streamlining production through the use of DSS specific to rice diseases. Rice blast, in particular, is one of the diseases that causes the most economic damage to agriculture globally, which is why we are convinced that this project can become a benchmark within the European agri-food sector, leading more and more farmers to use more sustainable agricultural practices,” comments Matteo Vanotti, CEO of xFarm Technologies.
Adds Raffaele Stupazzini, from xFarm, which directly monitors operations in the field: “xFarm is basically a management system that allows farmers to track all the information they need to fill out paperwork such as the ‘farm logbook’ or to receive advice and information to help them make decisions. In this project with Riso Gallo, we have worked to develop the Gallo4Farmers platform in order to capture the specific characteristics of rice cultivation and ensure that the information collected is primary data from each individual farm, which together allows Riso Gallo to measure the real impact of its supply chain.”
Much of this data contributed to the sustainability report recently released by Riso Gallo, which clearly outlines the company’s vision of innovation and collaboration to improve its sustainability and circularity. For example, it collaborates with partners such as Rice House, a start-up and benefit corporation that transforms rice husks into materials for green building; Albini Next, with which it has developed a fabric dyeing system using natural pigments extracted from the cooking water of parboiled black rice; and Biova Project, which recovers surplus food such as bread, pasta and rice to produce sustainable beers and snacks, reducing waste and creating new products with high added value.
Digital agriculture: the future is already in the field
In the context of agriculture, which has to contend with climate change, price volatility, water scarcity and demand for traceability, projects such as those by Riso Gallo and xFarm Technologies demonstrate that innovation is not an option, but a necessary condition for sustainability.
And if the challenge is to enable a resilient, transparent and competitive agri-food system, then partnerships like this are needed: where technology is not an end in itself, but a tool at the service of people, territories and the environment.
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