Agriculture

Tracking digital agriculture solutions globally for a sustainable agricultural transformation

Digital solutions can play an important role in supporting agricultural transformation towards sustainability and inclusion. This is particularly the case for low- and middle-income countries, where digital solutions can reach people in places that are difficult to reach otherwise. At the same time, we see investments in digital agriculture solutions in the agricultural sector lagging behind other sectors. Solutions often fail to reach the sector at scale and thus local economies are not benefiting from them. The Digital Agri Hub collects information on digital agriculture solutions and helps digital solution providers to find partners to work with and governments, donors and investors to make effective investments that benefit farmers and local economies.

Scoring the quality of Dutch soils

The Duch Open Bodem Index shows the soil quality of agricultural parcels through one overall soil index. This index is composed of 5 different aspects: chemical (e.g. pH, nutrient availability, physical (e.g. compaction, drainage), biology (e.g. microbiological activity), environment (e.g. nitrogen leaching) and management (e.g. use of catch crops, soil tillage).

Lifting farmers out of poverty by farm-to-fork investments

In many rural areas of the world, agricultural value chains are key for improving food security and lifting small holder farmers out of poverty. A major problem is to increase crop production for markets in a sustainable and resilient way through improved farming practices, transport and storage conditions, processing facilities and market opportunities. Public and private investments can support this positive transformation of value chains, but investors lack proper data-based tools that can help to identify and prioritize interventions and evaluate the investments.

Supporting agricultural modelling with virtual research

Agri-food research is increasingly becoming an international network of research groups working together in large multi-disciplinary projects. To efficiently solve food security challenges, agricultural modelers need to work together, sharing their knowledge, data and algorithms. Although opportunities for remote collaboration and sharing resources in the cloud are available, most of them are offered commercially through big tech companies. There are still many barriers for their use, like a lack of integration of different services and considerations of trust, safety, ownership, privacy and openness. Reliable and open shared working environments are needed that support the whole research process.

AgERA5 - global weather data set tailored for agriculture

Global historical and near real-time weather information, such as basic hourly ERA5, is provided by the European Copernicus programme. AgERA5 makes the ERA5 data available to users in the agricultural domain. It includes agro-meteorological variables such as daily mean, minimum and maximum temperature, precipitation, humidity and incoming solar radiation. All land areas are covered at a spatial resolution of 10 by 10 km from 1979 until now.

AgroDataCube – Open, big data for Dutch Agriculture

Many agricultural and environmental applications and assessments require information at the agricultural parcel level on soils, climate, crop growth, elevation, and crop rotation. The AgroDataCube is a Big & Open data platform that brings together and publishes all these different datatypes, harmonized to the level of agricultural parcels. As a user you don’t have to deal with all the challenging tasks in data alignment and linking. The AgroDataCube solves the following common problems in data usage: 1. While a lot of data is available, it is fragmented and scattered, and often there ar