Brussels 5^th February 2020 - Advanced smart technologies and their data play a vital role in ensuring sustainable production in today’s agricultural systems. The agricultural machinery industry understands its role as a major producer of agronomic data, and how digital agriculture can lead to a modernisation of the sector in Europe.

Achieving easy, secure, automatic transfer of data between platforms, is the key element in the CEMA strategy paper to achieve a full roll-out of Agricultural Machinery Data-sharing. Hence, agricultural machinery manufacturers are developing technical solutions over the coming years that help farmers and users of smart farming equipment to get the most value out of their data. The industry is developing the tools that will give farmers absolute freedom to access all their data from the farm management system of their choice.

Ivo Hostens, CEMA Technical Director said “this strategy is built upon the EU Code of conduct on agricultural data sharing by contractual agreement - CEMA was one of the initiators and co-signatories – but while the Code was about establishing trust by defining principles and providing rights, this strategy intends to build trust by proper design of technology.”

The agricultural machinery industry is aware that “one-size-fits-all” solution is not possible as many software applications and data formats were developed for specific environments and functionalities. Therefore, the industry is working on the development of an open source interface to allow data exchange between platforms from different manufacturers and solve interoperability issues.

How to move forward?

AEF, the Agricultural industry Electronics Foundation, will be working on this interface as well as guaranteeing data transfer is secured.  The safety and security of the machinery and in future highly automated machinery may have a significant impact in terms of liability. Hence, access to data would be organized from an OEM cloud level.

To ensure the full deployment of agricultural machinery data-sharing is a reality, input from the whole production chain will be needed to establish data governance rules (i.e. who gets what data when and under which conditions).

Finally, the strategy paper also outlines all pre-conditions for the rise of the agricultural digital era such as the need for full broadband connectivity in rural areas and the need for sustained investments in smart technologies and digital skills.

Please check out the full document here.

For further information, please contact

Beatriz Arribas Communications Manager

+32 2 706 81 75

beatriz.arribas@cema-agri.org

About CEMA

CEMA (www.cema-agri.org) is the association representing the European agricultural machinery industry. With 11 national member associations, the CEMA network represents both large multinational companies and numerous European SMEs active in this sector.

CEMA represents about 4,500 manufacturers, producing more than 450 different types of machines and generating an aggregated annual turnover of more than EUR 28 billion. 135,000 people are directly employed in the sector, with a further 125,000 people working in distribution and maintenance.

CEMA companies produce a large range of machines that cover any activity in the field from seeding to harvesting as well as equipment for livestock management. That entails ploughs, seeders, spreaders, sprayers, mowers, trailers, tractors, combines or specialised harvesters among others. Modern agricultural machines provide solutions for farms of all sizes which are used on a regular basis, according to plants’ growth cycle and season of the year.