Agdatahub / Consent and data exchange in agriculture

Practical example and current challenges

• Agdatahub is supporting the agricultural sector by implementing tools to ensure, that data sovereignty can be a day-to-day reality for French and European farmers, as the sector is an attractive cradle of data. Their vision of high-performance and sustainable agriculture, which is open to the world is firmly anchored in the four pillars of innovation, community, European sovereignty and fair governance. The use case is acting in creating value in agricultural chains by mobilising data intelligence for healthy, traceable and environmentally friendly food, and for technical advice tools to farmers. They give operational advice on the structuring and exploitation of agricultural data, support and assistance for optimal exploitation of data as well as advice data scientists and marketing managers to communicate about their data offers.
• As a technical solution Agdatahub provides API-Agro, an exchange platform, to offer a functional, technical, business and legal framework for data exchange between the different stakeholders: upstream industries, upstream agriculture, agrifood companies, digital agriculture, financial services, professional organisations, public sector, education and research. The platform is currently used by more than 800 users, mostly French, using open and private data and APIs.
• Digital identity and consent (in terms of authorisations) for farmers is another approach of Agdatahub. They are implementing a consent router to centralise consents from Farm Management System (FMS) and consent managers that have been developed in the ecosystem. The router is going to be interconnected to the data exchange platform to check up if farmers have consented to share their data executing the exchange.
• Agdatahub uses its expertise in operational consultancy to support farming industry actors in their exploitation of data and shares its knowledge in different projects. Agdatahub is currently planning to create a dashboard from which the farmer will manage the authorisations that he issues to his employees or partners to access the plan protection products room or use robotic equipment.

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

• By using the same infrastructure, GAIA-X and Agdatahub can create significant synergies and added value for the entire agricultural industry. Further, both enable a visibility for the digital potential within the domain. Agdatahub is participating in the emergence and co-construction of digital projects which is good for all European digital stakeholders. Their initiative is about to support and develop digital services that protect the environment and the economic equilibrium.
• The company tries to push innovation in agricultural sector forward by enabling an easy and secure access to data. This stimulates innovation among industry and digital actors, and anticipates, predicts and transforms risks into opportunities. It’s important to ensure equitable access to data for all stakeholders in the European agricultural ecosystem. The aim is to build a community that acts collectively by collaborating in the development of tools that facilitate the provision, sharing, exchange and interconnection of data in their territory. GAIA-X is conceived to assure data sovereignty, that is very important to Agdatahub. User decides for himself, in every step.
• Both projects attach great importance to trust and security as guidelines to implement solutions. Respecting the privacy by design principles, all solutions have been implemented to ensure high-security level with Know Your Customer (KYC), data encryption full traceability of all actions. Besides, the Agdatahub products have integrated the recommendations from the EU Code of conduct on agricultural data sharing by contractual agreement to empower farmers on their own data governance. The principles of security by design and privacy by design of GAIA-X added value to the ecosystem and the guaranty of the highest security requirements and the protection of privacy.
• The technological solutions of Agdatahub are responding to the needs of the European agricultural sector. By scaling up the existing data exchange platform to Europe, Agdatahub will create great value in agricultural chains by mobilising data intelligence for healthy, traceable and environmentally friendly food and new advice tools for farmers.

Use Case Team

• Sébastien Picardat – Agdatahub
• Julie Menez – Agdatahub
• APCA Chambers of agriculture
• Technical agricultural institutes : ACTA, ARVALIS, Terres Inovia, Institut de l’Elevage
• ALLICE, a union of cooperatives which unites all the French animal selection and reproduction companies and also a Belgian selection company
• SYNGENTA, world leader in seeds and crop protection products
• VALOGENE, a genotyping information system
• GEVES, French Variety and Seed Study and Control Group
• MesParcelles, one of the main French Farm Management Information Systems