Pavilion 9, Stands A16-B16 (Coldiretti/Cattolica Assicurazioni)

Verona, 31 January 2018

The Cattolica Assicurazioni Group’s story began in the agri-food sector. It was founded in 1896 to protect small landowners from damage caused by hail and fire.

In today’s environmental context – in which climate change is no longer a hypothetical event belonging to a far-off future, but a current and changing phenomenon we must learn to live with – the Cattolica Assicurazioni Group is tackling leading issues in research and technologies that can guarantee a wide range of products to support any size of agricultural companies, including products for correctly reporting damages in the event of disastrous events.

With a dedicated and highly specialised structure, Cattolica is now committed to the Progetto Agricoltura [Project Agriculture], which is developed across several themes:

1. Innovation of the service for the insured farmer;
2. Innovation in evaluations;
3. Innovation of products.

“POCKET FARM”: THE CATTOLICA GROUP SMART APP

One of the most cutting-edge services is the “Pocket Farm” Smart App, patented by Cattolica. The innovative App was developed in collaboration with the University of Milan. In a few steps, it allows farmers to monitor their crops.

Pocket Farm is the world’s first “low cost” scientifically certified application that gives a simple direct summary in real time of results that would only otherwise be attained from equipment far more complicated and cumbersome, not to mention costly, as is currently used by leading companies.

At full functionality, the application can:

1. Carry out measurements of leaf condition (leaf area index) and nitrogen content of the plant – variables of interest to the farmer – which provide information on the crop's vegetation state, helping to monitor the crop season (currently available for rice and corn);
2. Receive three-day weather forecasts based on the insured crop type with information on temperature, rainfall and wind. Pocket Farm automatically generates alerts that signal when the parameters exceed the crop damage/specific thresholds dictated by adverse weather conditions. The damage thresholds for each crop are set by the University of Milan.

SATELLITE MONITORING IN FARMING (the first in Italy for use in evaluation)

In collaboration with CNR-IREA (the National Research Council - Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment) the Cattolica Assicurazioni Group is the first in Italy to develop innovative instruments designed to use reprocessed satellite images with plant health indices used by experts to monitor herbaceous crops and identify samples for evaluation.

In particular, the satellite web App has:

• Georeferencing of plots with overlapping processed maps;
• Cadastral mapping (currently available in Lombardy);
• Consultation of the processed maps before and after the meteorological event to verify the damage.

Last March, the project was presented with an award at the International Temperate Rice Conference in Griffith NSW, Australia. It was selected from one of the 12 best projects with scientific and innovative themes.