The MAGIC Project: A Tool for Promoting Safety in Agriculture During COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic poses a threat to global health highlighting the importance of prevention and measures of social distancing. In agriculture, cultivation operations carried out in open field by farm workers represent a serious danger in this sense. Social distancing of the workers during the labor day is not always easy to be maintained, especially for the very close rows among the plants. In 2020, the researchers of the Mechanics Section of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Forest Sciences in collaboration with the Department of Engineering of the University of Palermo, presented a project entitled “Design of a real time Monitoring and control system for AGrIcultural workers to limit the SARS-Cov-2 virus” (acronym MAGIC) to the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The aim of the project was the design of a real time monitoring and control system for workers in agriculture in order to monitor, record and control any violations of the distance among the workers. The system is based on the use of a small device equipped with a uniquely stored serial number that securely emits an alarm signal to both the worker and the manager when the distance between two employees is below the permitted threshold. A central manager perform a historical “track” that lists all the subjects with whom a person has come into close contact. The system was tested at a farm in Sicily during winter pruning in vineyard.