Mid-Year Meeting a Success

Europe Region

Mid-Year Meeting a Success

By Conny Graumans, Europe Region Director

Some 35 agriculture-industry leaders from throughout Europe attended AgGateway’s Mid-Year Seminar on 22 June. I’d like to personally thank BASF, and especially Udo Kaempf, for hosting the meeting the BASF Visitors Center in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

It was a successful meeting, with plenty of engagement from the participants. The seminar commenced with a word from the AgGateway Europe Steering Committee’s new chair, Klaus-Herbert Rolf from Claas, and was followed by a review of key agriculture development in the region through a series of presentations. Below are some of the highlights:

Gabor Mehn of One Smart Spray shared details on a fresh collaboration between the Bosch company and BASF for taking high-speed precision spraying to the next level.

Pablo Cid of Lexagri explained how it is possible to manage buffer zones in different countries and regions and what data are relevant to do so. Lexagri gathers all relevant data in their database and makes it available for third parties.

Johan Booij from the Wageningen University and Research Center presented a standard to link metadata to annotated images of pests in crops so that these images can be reused for training smart algorithms (for example, weed robots). This should accelerate the development of smart algorithms for pest recognition and the performance of pest control robots. A new business model would trade machine independent images and algorithms for pest detection.

Andy Jenkinson of Varda presented the Varda solution for sharing crop field identifiers in order to link field and crop related data from different sources to a specific field.

Patrik Nordgren of Mtech went into detail about the Mtech platform solution to share agricultural data. For example, the platform supports the exchange of breeding data in dairy farming (herd improvement), based on the ICAR standards, as presented by Andrew Cooke of Rezare.

Tom Quets of GS1 advocated for the broader use of GS1 global identifiers (GLN, GTIN, GPC, SSCC) in agriculture. The GS1 standards are widely used in international trade and logistics of fruits and vegetables, but hardly used in arable supply chains.

David McMahon of Cool Farm Alliance presented on how the Cool Farm Tool is used in more and more countries all over the world, to provide farmers with an independent and objective indication of the carbon footprint as well as the footprints of other global heating emission gasses.

If you have any questions about the meeting or activities in the Europe region, please contact me via email. The year-end meeting dates and location for the Europe region will be announced in the fall.