Seminar Wrap-Up

Europe Region

Seminar Wrap-Up

By Conny Graumans, Regional Director

AgGateway Europe welcomed members and digital connectivity stakeholders in the region to its Spring Seminar on 14 March in Berlin.

The meeting centered around two key topics: How to organize data flows in the agricultural production chains to support the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and sustainability reporting in general, and how to promote and support e-Invoicing so we will be ready for European and National legislation that makes B-to-B e-Invoicing mandatory in 2030. Establishing what eInvoicing standard needs to be used is most urgently needed in France, Belgium and Germany, where it will be mandatory beginning in in 2026.

Concerning CSRD the key question is, do we need to standardize the reporting by farm input providers about their deliveries to farmers? Two examples are the nutrients composition of animal feed to dairy farmers and the composition of a specific blend of fertilizer to the arable farmer. There is a growing need for such reporting agreements.

In other industries (e.g. textile, electronics) we see the implementation of product-passports to support the recycling of consumer goods. Could these solutions from other industries and branches serve as a template to develop product passports for agricultural use?

Sharing digital product data in an agricultural production chain, or more broadly, an agrifood network, requires a set of agreements that covers semantics, syntaxis, exchange protocols, authentication & authorization, and security. This set of agreements adds substance to the European Agricultural Dataspace.

We see agricultural data spaces being developed at a granular level for specific agricultural branches. For example, ICAR is developing the data space for bovine animals and dairy farming, and AEF is developing the dataspace for datasharing in the tractor and equipment industry. The challenge for the years to come is to make these fragmented agriculture related dataspaces interconnected. That is where the guidelines and building blocks for the European Agricultural Dataspace come in handy.

AgGateway provides the forum for envisioning future data sharing in agriculture and in making next steps to get there. AgGateway has a rich history in promoting useful existing standards and, if needed, developing new ones. AgGateway has a role to play in enabling the message payloads and data schemas used within the data spaces.

The presentations at the AgGateway Spring Seminar touched on these challenges and provide part of the answers and solutions to make it all work.You can find the program and the presentations from the seminar here:

https://aggateway.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EventPubli/pages/4551934657/2025-03-14+AgGateway+Europe+spring-seminar