ExoCrop – A climate service for smart and climate-resilient agriculture
The ExoCrop project (EXploring Climate Opportunities and assessing the suitability of Romania’s teRitory for Optimized and Performing agRiculture) was launched on the 18th of February 2025 at the Faculty of Geography of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. It is a complex project, coordinated by INDECO Soft and gathering experts from two universities- UBB (Babeș-Bolyai University) and USAMV (University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca), one research institute- the Research and Development Station for Plant Culture on Sandy Soils Dăbuleni (SCDCPN Dabuleni), and another IT company – Creative Space.
The project is focused on detecting the climate suitability and a climate service for three crops: sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L) Lam), peanuts (Arachis hypogaea), and cowpea (Vigna unguiculata). Originally from warmer climates of Asia, Africa or North America, they are considered as exotic to Romanian agriculture.
All three crops are adapted to dry climates, with few precipitation and high temperatures. Given the dramatic climate changes experienced by countries like Romania, adopting these crops could become a necessity and an opportunity. They are termophile and drought-resilient crops, which give superior yields under climatic stress experienced in the last three decades by all European countries, and mainly by Romania. They represent a promise of making the region more resilient and self-sustainable in terms of food security. Thus, the ExoCrop project is developing methods and training for the necessary and, in many aspects, imposed transition towards exotic, more resilient crops that would ensure food security for the region.
The activities of the 24-month project are multi-layered. They aim at the following targets:
- Design an integrated agroclimatic service as an online platform which will supply relevant data to the farmers as to:
- Providing a 7-month weather forecast for the entire growing season of the three crops;
- Creating suitability maps for the three crops at 10 km² spatial resolution (or even better depending on data availability) for the entire territory of Romania;
- Supplying crop rotation plans for every region of Romania, integrating the three crops to give the farmers viable options for output growth as well as soil conservation;
- Creating the Exocrop Farmers Network – including farmers from as many regions of Romania as possible, who volunteer to test out at least one of the three aforementioned crops. They will be the agroclimatic platform testers and provide inputs to improve the climate service.
- Science 4 All– an Open Science effort to promote the three crops in Romania and, simultaneously, raise the awareness of the necessity and advantages of transitioning to unconventional crops more suitable for the new climatic conditions brought by climate change.
The contribution of the partners are as follows:
INDECO Soft, the project coordinator, assisted by Creative Space company, will integrate the research results into a workable Beta version of the integrated agroclimatic service developed as an online platform.
The Babeș-Bolyai University – Faculty of Geography – the Climate research and know-how pertaining to the project, providing the climate prediction models; the Department of Computer Sciences– providing the AI models that will integrate the data and the training protocols for them.
The University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca provides the know-how for the optimal integration of the three crops in the Romanian agricultural ecosystem and for the technologies involving the three crops. They are also responsible for initiating the ExoCrop farmers network.
The Research and Development Station for Plant Culture on Sandy Soils Dăbuleni – has a vast experience in the agriculture experiments in the semi-arid areas, as it is placed in the most dry and agricultural-unfriendly regions of Romania; the organisation experimented for decades in adapting exotic crops (dates, sweet potato, cowpea, kiwi, peanuts, etc.) to the local conditions.