Year-End Meeting Highlights Region’s Progress

Europe Region Update

Year-End Meeting Highlights Region’s Progress

By Conny Graumans, Europe Region Director

AgGateway’s Europe community held its year-end meeting December 7-8 to review progress made on key projects in 2022, and to set a course for 2023 projects and work. The meeting was hosted at the CLAAS factory site in Harsewinkel, Germany. Many thanks go out to Klaus-Herbert Rolf of 365FarmNet and the representatives from CLAAS for opening their space for his meeting and, for providing an interesting tour of the factory.

During the year-end meeting on the first day, the workplan for Europe for 2023 was finalized. We will continue working on the Closed Loop Spray project and the Potato Provenance project, while taking on additional new areas of focus. These will include:

  • Non-treatment spray buffer zones
  • Carbon footprint, animal feed provenance
  • Livestock farming
  • Robotics, algorithms for image recognition
  • Supply chain support Ag Input Industry

A charter will be developed for each of these new items, followed by an invitation for members to participate in the new working groups. Timelines and priorities will be developed by the Europe steering committee and member input.

During day two, several relevant projects and developments were presented in a seminar format. These topics were relevant due to existing organizational partnerships, relationships between standards and resources, or implications for future work.

Slawi Stesny from AGCO Corp. presented the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation’s (AEF) AgIN initiative. AgIn stands for ‘Agricultural Interoperability Network’. The AgIN network is envisioned to be a concerted and non-discriminatory governed network that streamlines peer–to-peer interfaces between platforms, but unlike the multitude of solutions on offer today, AgIN ensures reliability and trust of the services in the network. AEF is an AgGateway member organization, and the two organizations have a formal arrangement for working together in areas of common interest.

Patrick Pagani, Senior Advisor at Copa-Cogeca, presented on the impact of the European Data Act on the data position of the farmer and on data sharing in the agrifood value chain. Copa Cogeca is the European umbrella organisation for farmers and for agricultural cooperatives in Europe.

The new EU Data Act provides more “stick” regulation on data ownership, as well as interoperability and portability in data sharing Europe. It aims to strengthen the data position of the farmer. The new EU Data Act will also impact the current Copa-Cogeca code of conduct for data sharing in agriculture.

For AgGateway, it is important to work close together with Copa Cogeca in improving data sharing to support member ability to comply with the new regulatory framework.

Marie Beuret, Agro EDI Europe (AEE) and an AgGateway Associate Member, presented on the regional standards the AEE community defined and implemented for French agriculture software solutions, and which may address wider European purposes thanks to inclusion of key European interoperability elements. One challenge that European implementation presents is the plethora of national or regional standards. AgGateway may be a place where harmonization discussions can take place. Further, cooperation between AEE and AgGateway could be of great importance to improve interoperability and ADAPT implementation in Europe.

The presentations of the AgGateway year-end-meeting are to be found here for AgGateway members.