CAPIGI 2011 took place in Amsterdam from 4th to 6th of April. The Community on Agricultural Policy Implementation and Geo-Information gathered for the 4th time, connecting people from governments, industry and research organisations, discussing the impact of geo-information in implementing agricultural policy. Sticking to its’ format that was invented in 2005, CAPIGI again was able to present state-of-the-art overviews on innovation and research in geo sciences and geomatics, being illustrated with practice experiences in agricultural policy implementation and the latest developments in the EU agricultural policy domain.
If you missed CAPIGI 2011 or are still digesting the information bombardment from the about forty presentations that were packed in sessions, you just have to remember three words:Mapping, Sensing and Guidance. On Monday afternoon we started with the Opening Session followed by the session Setting the Scene. On Tuesday CAPIGI presented you a full programme with European Space Dimensions and Machine Guidance in the morning, being followed in the afternoon by parallel sessions of respectively Information Exchange, GI Community Sourcing and two sessions of Sensing. On Wednesday morning we continued with a session on Landscape Features and we ended this years’ conference with the session on the CAP2013+.
CAPIGI saw a small rise in numbers of participants: one hundred participants from thirteen European countries, of which -since the conference this time was in the Netherlands- many of them Dutch. With fifteen sponsors and exhibitors the organisers of CAPIGI, the Dutch consultancy company AeroVision, were happy to see these numbered almost doubled the last big CAPIGI conference held in 2008 in Dublin.
This time CAPIGI was scheduled back-to-back with the Land Parcel Identification Systems Workshop (LPIS) 2011, which saw another one hundred participants coming from all European Member States. LPIS 2011 was organised by JRC and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation. CAPIGI’s modest exhibition market partly covered both events giving the exhibitors and participants contacts and leads to follow up upon. All of the above-mentioned figures underline the growing market and interest in geo-information as source to help the agricultural market, clearly a fast growing field.
Precision Agriculture
Precision Agriculture (PA) was one of the main ingredients of CAPIGI. PA increases the productivity, while it reduces inputs and maintains our landscape. In one of the talks the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation stated with their ‘Programme Precision Agriculture’ that they aim to: reduce 20% of the use of nitrogen fertilizers, reduce 35% of the use of plant protection products, save fuel and reduce emission of nitrous oxide.
The other main ingredient is the use by governments of exactly the same technologies but for other purposes. In particular the systems related to subsidy management and environmental protection rely on mapping (registration), sensing (monitoring) and navigation systems (control).
Mapping
Looking at CAPIGI in general and Precision Agriculture (PA) in particular one can recognize three pillars: Mapping, Sensing and Guidance, in this report two presentations for every pillar are outlined.
Governmental use of ‘Mapping’ is about registration. This is of course not a new issue, but with the ever increasing integration of digital GIS and other administrative information systems the quality and in particular it’s assurance processes become important. A subject being discussed by many, such as by Ad van der Meer from the geo department of the city of Amsterdam, Peat Allen from the UK’s Ordnance Survey and by the EU Joint Research Centre (JRC). Wim Devos of JRC explained about the Land Parcel Identification System and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
The CAP represents a formal EU requirement on GIS in the Member States stating that “the identification system for agricultural parcels shall be established on the basis of maps or land registry documents or other cartographic references, where use shall be made of computerised geographical information system techniques including preferably aerial or spatial orthoimagery with an homogenous standard”. The LPIS systems basically follows the INSPIRE regulation but has not been named part of it. With it’s long standing implementation it seems ahead of INSPIRE by 5 years.
Manufacturing Business
A totally different talk within mapping came from the manufacturing business. Thinus Glitz from CLAAS Agrosystems spoke about mobile data collection and data management in modern agriculture. Although the talk was mainly on CLAAS’ products – and the speaker at the end admitted it was his first presentation in English (which was answered by applause) – the talk lead to lots of questions and a good discussion on sharing data. Companies collect a lot of data that can be of interest to others.
Someone wondered if CLAAS with governments discusses how to share this information to make it of use for different purposes. The presenter replied that the farmers are the actual owners of the data and that they don’t share this info with third parties.
“The only time”, Armin Werner from the audience added to the discussion, “companies share info, is in case of a research project like for example iGreen where they have made special arrangements regarding this subject”.
The audience jointly stated that they think this is a real pity and believe that they should more work together. The discussion ended with a clear statement saying that a farmer should not be afraid to share his data, but he should get something in return for sharing the information!
Sensing
Within the topic ‘Sensing’ it was all about monitoring the state of crops and fields. Where things like crop sensing, satellite navigation and shared imagery today only is a reality for front-runners, it is expected this kind of data will be general available within the near future (3-5 years).
The whole range of sensing capabilities was presented in this session, from satellites to soil sensors and in between the Greenseeker – a tractor mounted sensor – and the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to measure local details.
Presenters show how sensor information needs to be transformed into management practice. Eric Tielemans from the Dutch company Basfood showed what his system can do by feeding satellite data into a model that helps farmers in deciding when and where to irrigate, fertilize or spray the crop against diseases.
GI Community Sourcing
Interesting talks were also to be found in the session on GI community sourcing, where in fact the discussion that started after the manufacturing business talk continued. Here Grega Milcinski from the Slovenian company Sinergise talked about the rise of crowd sourcing. His experience is that it’s important to award people in some way after they voluntary have added information.
In the case of a project of theirs where volunteers created cycling maps, people that added data immediately received a figure showing how fast, etc. they were cycling. This is what should be done with farmers and their information too – immediate and useful feedback to the data providers.
Guidance
The third pillar ‘Guidance’ included talks on control and on improved use of tractor guidance systems to e.g. prevent farmers to tumble over when their tractor is on a too steep slope for instance. In addition: a recent mid-term review report of the European Commission on the European Radio Navigation Programmes stated that: “It is estimated that 6-7% of GDP in developed countries, i.E. €800 billion in the European union, is dependent on satellite navigation”.
A US report from the Space Policy Institute gave the impact of GNSS: Delivery Services (100% impact for fleet mgt / T&T), Utilities (60% satnav time synchronisation), Communications (40% smart phones), Banking & Financial (35% for time stamping), and Agriculture (10% impact due precision ag.). These sectors contribute 10% to GDP in EU and in US. There is an expected use and impact of Galileo that for Agriculture is stated as: 1) improve design and update of land registry information, 2) allow precision agriculture and production monitoring and 3) improve control over the use of EU subsidies. For this there is an inspected increase of farmers’ productivity by 10-20%, and reduce of CAP enforcement costs.
Landscape Features
Anticipating on the LPIS workshop that was scheduled after CAPIGI some of the talks discussed digitization of borders in the landscape. Problems of shadows on photos have made some companies like Trimble with their eCognition search for solutions using for example Vegetation Indexes to indicate objects better, leading to better borders, explained by Malte Sohlbach from Trimble & Matthias Trap from Agroscience.
Rob Beck from the Dutch company NEO on Earth Observation updated the audience on change detection being part of their daily job. He shared his Geo-Information Management Cycle: validation known mutations lead to signalising of unknown mutations, leading to mapping (actualisation), leading to controlling processed mutations and than back to the first one. The updating numbers speak for themselves – In Holland 9% of all buildings, 8% of all ditches and not less than 15% of all roads and trees need to be updated every single year! Similar situations occur in big urban areas such as London and Paris. Geo-information outdates quickly in all European countries.
CAP 2013+
Furthermore the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) by 2013 was discussed. Florian Dittrich of DG-AGRI provided an update on the CAP reform and reported on recent developments in the Commission’s approach, after their Communication “The CAP towards 2020” on 18 November 2010. He explained that reform was needed due to economic, environmental and territorial challenges with food security as the dominant issue.
Having objectives like viable food production, sustainable management of natural resources and climate action and a balanced territorial development, a common EU policy is needed. The speaker presented three policy options, explaining all these options have their supporters. Option 2 saying that one should capture the opportunity to reform ensuring that CAP becomes more sustainable and balanced (between policy objectives, member states and farmers) through more ‘green’ targeted measures appeared most popular.
Building Bridges
Dittrich sees many challenges for innovation in agriculture. He believes the lack of a harmonised research agenda prevents science and industry to contribute effectively;
He thinks that PA can contribute to greening the CAP and to information exchange for control etc.; and that integration of both worlds can and will contribute to a stronger, smarter and more viable agricultural export product. Finishing, he said one should build bridges between cutting-edge research and technology and farmers, businesses, stakeholders, industry and advisors. This is just the bridge CAPIGI aims to achieve!
Concluding Remarks
It’s not news that the Precision Agriculture world has large potential and is rapidly growing. The combination of CAPIGI and the LPIS workshop was successful, as the LPIS-world appeared rather unknown to PA, finding a appreciative audience to listen to the added value of Precision Agriculture, and vice versa. Conference Chair Tamme van der Wal concluded: “Geo-Information is a crucial enabler of innovations; a critical carrier of information about what we think is important; Governments and farms share the same technologies in the same real-world but they are now organising their own spatial data infrastructures and systems. Sharing it would half the efforts and double the benefits.”
