What Life Cycle Assessments Have in Common with Digitalisation - Qualitas AG

About the job

On 26 November 2019, the 11th Life Cycle Assessment Platform took place at Agroscope. Marina Kraus attended the conference, which was dedicated to digitalisation and automation in agriculture and their impacts on life cycle assessments and environmental indicators, on behalf of Qualitas. The specialist presentations mainly introduced online tools for data collection as well as methods for using data from environmental indicators. The World Café gave all participants the opportunity to actively engage in discussions about digitalisation in agriculture.

It was already foreseeable from the programme’s publication that the expert presentations would be exciting. While some presentations were to introduce existing tools and systems primarily designed for data collection, other talks addressed various questions regarding data usage.

Online Tools in Focus

Barto describes himself as a digital farm manager. Jürg Guggisberg presented the components "Suissebilanz", "Meadow and Grazing Journal" and "Animal Traffic", which are currently offered by Barto, and gave insights into planned expansions for 2020.

Subsequently, Raymond Mortagui, Raphaël Althaus and Sandie Masson from AGRIDEA presented the online data collection for direct payment applications with ACORDA. During a live demo, they showed the conference participants how the farms participating in the project in the cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel and Jura record their data online.

Not Only Collecting Data but Also Using It

Sonja Kay from Agroscope dealt with data for site-adapted agricultural use. She uses data from local, regional, cantonal and national maps to derive statements about climate, soil type, primary soil use, land classification or environmental status. Since many of these data are available in different currency and resolution depending on their origin, the evaluation is not necessarily straightforward. This project clearly shows that advancing digitalisation and the development of artificial intelligence could be a step in the right direction to use existing data collections sensibly and not only for individual applications.

Following this, Pierre-Henri Dubuis demonstrated how Agrometeo creates targeted forecasts and management aids for Swiss agriculture in crop production using various meteorological data. The platform already uses freely accessible weather data as well as a nationwide measurement network. Using various forecast models, infection risks of plant diseases are estimated and decision support in plant protection is provided.

World Café on Digitalisation in Agriculture

The World Café is a discussion format where all interested parties discuss specific topics in small, changing groups. For the nearly one-hour programme, the organisers of the Life Cycle Assessment Platform had defined four thematic blocks in advance:

What could be the opportunities and risks of digitalisation in agriculture?

Which obstacles regarding data protection, data sovereignty and access should be prioritised for removal?

Where is additional research and development needed?

Which promising technologies and applications exist through digitalisation in agriculture?

Since Qualitas has signed the Charter on Digitalisation of the Swiss Agricultural and Food Industry and has volunteered to participate in the former data protection and sovereignty department, I first chose this thematic focus. Opinions, or rather perceptions, on the buzzword data protection provide much cause for discussion and there are many prejudices or fears among users.

No one wants their data to be publicly accessible, especially when it concerns personal and operational data. All participants in the discussion agreed on this point. However, the question arises as to why digitalisation, online tools and data collection should be carried out on an ever-increasing scale and in a futuristic manner if the data may only be used by the individual and not by the general public afterwards? At this point, opinions diverge.

Fundamentally, data protection should of course serve to protect information and thus the privacy of users. And this is important, because in many applications users cannot decide whether they want to record their data in a system or not. For example, those who want to receive direct payments are obliged to collect data. It goes without saying that this data must be highly protected.

These and other large amounts of data provide important information about needs and trends in our society and thus also in agriculture. Anonymised data that cannot be traced back to an individual person or, for example, an agricultural operation, are therefore drivers for new developments and innovations. They help improve, simplify or reinvent systems. The concept of data protection should therefore not be understood as a complete restriction of access to data in a digital world and digital agriculture, but as protection of personality – whether individual or operation.

If the participants’ stomachs had not growled, the discussion on this topic would probably have lasted much longer, as opinions are as diverse as the data collected.

Accessibility and Data Protection

The afternoon continued with an equally exciting programme. Jens Lansche from Agroscope presented the SALCAfuture project (Swiss Agricultural Life Cycle Assessment), which is a life cycle assessment method. Immediately afterwards, Alain Valsangiacomo (Agroscope) demonstrated digitalisation and data handling using the central evaluation of environmental indicators.

Both projects pursue the approach of using as much existing data as possible but face the same challenges. The different resolution and accessibility of the data, the rapid development of existing software, as well as satisfactory concepts regarding transparency and data protection, are important aspects in both projects.

SALCAfuture is therefore a web-based tool that takes modern IT standards into account, places high demands on data protection and at the same time follows a flexible concept to respond to rapidly changing needs in practice. For the agri-environmental indicators, the available data are anonymised by an external body – in this case the Agricultural Fiduciary Association – and only then made available for evaluations. This prevents conclusions about individual farms as far as possible, which is not always easy depending on the data type.

Digital Agriculture – the development of digital agriculture shows that many data are already being collected. However, the step towards comprehensive use is still ahead of us. (Image source: Accenture)

Conclusion

Overall, it became clear at the 2019 Life Cycle Assessment Platform that a great deal of agricultural data is already being collected today. The effective evaluation and use of these data pools is less advanced. Almost all the projects presented face the same or similar questions. In further digitalisation in agriculture, access, quality and evaluation of data as well as comprehensive and trustworthy data protection are the greatest challenges.

So what solutions are needed for forward-looking digitalisation in agriculture? Standardised interfaces and a more homogeneous structure of data sets would facilitate more efficient use of data. Transparent data flows and anonymised data for evaluations give all users the opportunity to understand where information flows and at the same time the desired security that their own data remain protected at all times.