News from the Europe Regional Group

Europe

News from the Europe Regional Group

By Conny Graumans, Director of the Europe Steering Committee

Welcome to the New Steering Committee Chair:  We’re happy to announce that Feroz Sheikh, Global Head of Digital Product Engineering at Syngenta, is the new chairman of AgGateway’s Europe Steering Committee. Feroz succeeds Hans Hulzebosch (ForFarmers). Many thanks to Hans for guiding the European region in its start-up stage.

Track & Trace of Crop Protection Products:  Based on the Cristal recommendations about identifying crop protection products throughout the supply chain, the industry, logistic service providers and distributors have joined forces in developing the Proagrica AgroCloSer-portal. The portal is designed to exchange digital orders, dispatch-advices and invoices throughout the supply chain. Logistic items are identified by their GS1 SSCC’s; and trade and consumer items are identified with GS1 GTINs. Mandatory data for the 2D-matrix code on the crop protection product labels are: GTIN, production date, batch-number, and expiration data. Exchanging these mandatory data-sets with supply chain partners enables track & trace on product items and supports quick recalls in case of calamities.

Data Exchange in Milking and Feeding with the International Committee for Animal Recording (ICAR):  AgGateway’s European Region is developing a strategic partnership with ICAR, the global association for breeding organisations for bovine animals. ICAR promotes the development and improvement of animal identification, performance recording and evaluation in farm animal production. In recent years ICAR developed a REST-Json based standard for data exchange with milking robots and feeding systems, in close cooperation with the industry and solution providers. The first implementations of this new interface are now taking place in New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom and The Netherlands.

Standardizing Work Orders and Work Records:  A fresh initiative has started to harmonize/standardize the data exchange with farm management information systems (FMISs) throughout Europe. In recent decades many different types of interfaces have been implemented. The first step to get this harmonized is to work towards a widely accepted reference data model with leading definitions of the most important entities (classes) and their attributes (data elements). A lot of material is already available to work with: We have the ADAPT data model, the UN/Cefact eCROP model, the Dutch reference model Agro, the Agro-EDI-Europe data model, and the ISO-XML data model. So it is quite a challenge to work towards one leading semantic data model. Gilles Begue (Smag) is the work group co-leader of the AgGateway track on standardizing work orders, work recommendations and work records. Parallel to this track, we are developing a second track on providing master data about farm inputs (crop protection product, seed, fertilizer). Lexagri-Homologa will serve as the lead for this track with Patricia Perez (Lexagri) and Valerie Strauman (Lexagri) as work group co-leaders.