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Analysis of potential needs of Agriculture Sector for EO analysis

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Analysis of potential needs of Agriculture Sector for EO analysis
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Agriculture comprises vital economic sectors producing food, agro-industrial feedstock, and energy and provides environmental services through managing soil, water, air, and biodiversity holistically. Agriculture including forestry also contributes to managing and reducing risks from natural disasters such as floods, droughts, landslides, and avalanches. Farming with its close contact to nature provides the socio-economic infrastructure to maintain cultural heritage. Farmers are also conservers of forests, pastures, fallow lands, and their natural resources and, in turn, of the environment. Agriculture today is a composite activity involving many actors and stakeholders in agri-food chains that produce and provide food and agricultural commodities to consumers. In addition to farmers, there are farm input suppliers, processors, transporters, and market intermediaries each playing their roles to make these chains efficient. Presentation will present analysis and the the vision of the EO4Agri project about the role of Earth observations in agriculture. The increasing economic, social, and environmental needs of agriculture pose many challenges for the upcoming years. This topic is closely related to the strategies of the United Nations and the European Union on sustainability. The United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The European Union presented in 2019 the European Green Deal - a roadmap to make the European economy sustainable. This white paper aims to stress the importance of knowledge management for agriculture to address these challenges. The role of Earth observation in this knowledge management is analysed including its current gaps and limitations. The white paper focuses on the definition of key problems, analysis data gaps, delivery platforms, analytical platforms, and final recommendations for future policies and financing. This document serves as an input for the future Strategic Research Agenda and the Policy Roadmap.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
So, as I was saying, thank you for being patient, for waiting for us for the last two presentations.
We have received some communication from our speakers. They are well entitled not to be here, unfortunately, so thank you for your patience. We would like to introduce our new speaker. It's Karel Charvat from the Czech Republic. Welcome, Karel.
Hello, good to be here. Yes, we can. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Yes, yes, it's okay. I would like to also introduce you. So, Karel is a graduated theoretical cybernetics.
He's also a member of the International Society for Precision Agriculture, the Research Data Alliance, the Club of Osea and other societies. He was the president between 2005 and 2007, the president of the European Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and Environment.
He's now chairman of the OGC Agriculture Directorate. He's also volunteering for the InspireHacks and also is part of the national implementation team of the Czech Republic, InspireGeoPortal.
He also participated in many other research projects, but I will let him actually present and tell us about the analysis of potential needs of agriculture sector for the EU analysis. Thank you, Karel.
Okay, thank you for the introduction. I will try to speak about our analysis and our vision of the needs of agriculture sector for Earth observation. In first two presentations, we heard about solution. Now, I will not speak at all about solution.
I will speak about what is needed or how agriculture sector can benefit from Earth observation. What we can do in the future to be better. This analysis was done by European projects AO for Agri.
It was the two years analysis of different groups in agriculture sector. We analyze primary production, food production, but also the needs of public sector, the needs of the financial sector and also the needs of information for food security, which is very close to previous presentation of GEOGLAM.
I will start with some important ideas or messages at the beginning. Yes, and I will start a little explain about agri-food sector.
I participate in many projects on many meetings and what we very often see as the mistake that people are trying to develop solution which where farmers can use Earth observation data.
This is not reality. I know few farmers who are really able to use Earth observation data directly, but the most of normal farmers, they need to know the knowledge which is generated from Earth observation data.
And they need to use this information in relation with other information sources. We already worked with European Space Agency around 2005 on the model of added value chain.
I think that till now this is not fully implemented and this is the future how there could be deliver benefit of Earth observation data to the farmers. We need to include all the different producers of information or different stakeholders into the chain
and find a way how we will be able to combine all this information sources for farmers. As I mentioned, other important players can be food industry.
Generally, food industry is in one way interested about information, about the potential of the market. But the companies which are focused on high level production, they are
very often also supporting, for example, what we are calling precision farming. And they are supporting services for farmers because they need to guarantee that farmers, their supplier will make top level production and they are running such type of services for farmers.
There is more organization who are now already doing this in the world. We can mention Nestle Barilla in the Czech now. For example, personal breweries also trying to support the farmers with such type of knowledge. So this is other player on the market.
Public sector. I am from Europe, of course, outside of Europe sometimes there are different rules in public sector. Therefore, in Europe we have this common agricultural policy and this common agricultural policy on one way is controlling the subsidies for payment system.
But what is important for the future that it will be not only used for the restriction for the purposes of the controlling of the farmers. But they can also help and cooperate on data sharing to be possible to use some services and farmers cheaper.
So it is important to connect this also into this one chain. Financial institutions, they are interested again about information on the market. But insurance companies are also interested to minimize damages and monitor the damages.
And again there could be some common interest with the farmers. So this is other player who has to be in some way included into the chain. And of course there is this global security and we heard a lot about GEOGRAM before.
So this is some part of this. But again we are now need to look on two levels. Yes, one level is this world level about the world production. And then second is how to help for example farmers in developing countries to increase their productivity to make their agriculture more sustainable.
This is something, this slide is very old. We've done this slide around 2008. Yes, it was in previous project. It was called Future Farm.
And already in this time we recognize that there could be some trends or challenges which can go opposite direction. Yes, we need to increase food quality and safety.
But the population is growing and we need also to find the way how to increase global production. Until now this is not a problem in Europe but in the global sky it is a problem. Yes, there is competition between production of the food and energy. So there is more such challenges which go from opposite direction.
And we need to find the solution how to find the optimal methods. And earth observation could be one from the sources. Now in Europe we have Green Deal which is defining some goals, very ambitious goals.
Reduce amount of nitrogen and fertilizer, decrease the usage of pesticides, increase biodiversity. And generally there is also sustainable development goals which came early. Then Green Deal, European and sustainable development goals are in some way in line.
So again here are the things which I mentioned that we discussed already many years ago. Zero hunger, it is food quality, clean environment. So there is many things which is necessary to solve in the future.
And the question is how earth observation can help to these goals on local but also on the global scale. In our projects we run some questionnaire. This was in Europe and you can see that the average scale of farms or production is relatively very low.
And then only 20% of the farms is bigger than 1000 hectares.
Of course it is different in different countries. And if we will go to developing countries this will be much more. So we have now the topic for the discussion how we can help with earth observation to these smaller farms.
The other question what we discussed with the community was about the resolution of the satellite data. And you can see that only for approximately half or a little more than half
the most common open data like Copernicus Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 or Transathematic Maple are. Taking us good but that number of farms require higher resolution than is possible
to use with this data and which is now only supplied by commercial providers. And the worst situation is the willingness of farmers to pay for these services. And you can see that most of the farmers are not willing to pay for the earth observation services more than 5 euro per hectare.
Two-thirds of the farmers are not willing to pay more than 5 euros per hectare for this type of services. And again this is some limitation.
So we can say that in the future agriculture we need to produce globally more with higher quality and using less land and fewer inputs at the same time. So this is important and also the resources are limited because for example willingness of farmers to pay for the services is limited.
We will be able only to do this if we will be able to build some good knowledge management.
Yes, because I mentioned that farmers are not interested about the data. Farmers are interested about the knowledge and wisdom to understand what and why they need to do something. And it is necessary to connect the number of organizations, the number of technologies that came from this poor data to this final wisdom.
We analyzed the data which were most often required by different groups. Here you can see the data which are most required by agri-food groups.
And what was very interesting that the most often was mentioned the weather forecast and this type of the data which are related in the climate. We analyzed these things not only in Europe but we also analyzed this in Africa.
But these things which were related to the weather, to climate, to soil and water was common for all Europe and Africa. And I expect that this could be something which is important globally. In a financial sector there are the main requirements for the potential of biomass production.
But for insurance flat, yes, it is important.
And if you are looking on these requirements it can be in some way combined with the requirements of farmers. Public sector, again if you go directly and more deeply to these common requirements you can see that a lot of things which could be
or which was considered as useful by the public sector can be also useful for farmers or for other organizations. And in the global scale I think that it is in line what already was mentioned in the geogram presentation.
What are the most important things but again this is a lot of related to the global production but also to the environmental issues.
About the data, yes. So data, data can be important source of information. It is useful that this data Copernicus or Landsat are open so this is the reason why people are trying to use this data as much as possible.
But in many cases there are requirements for better spatial resolution, new bands and to have the data more dense. We have now of course a big problem with the data from Landsat 1 Sentinel-2 with the cloud.
So there is necessary to look for the way how we can be able to combine these different data to have a real coverage during the season. And what is important that is necessary to derive the way how to combine and sometimes the data is necessary to combine with aerial or drone data.
There is important that now there exists number of deliver platform for this data.
Probably who are from Europe, you know that in Europe we have now this 5Dias platform. Till now this Dias platform were financed by public money mainly but it is expected that from 2002 there has to be a self-finance.
Then it's question if all five Dias platform will be able to run on the base of commercial services. Second thing is the knowledge building. You don't only deliver data but you need to have the solution which will be able from this data to derive information and knowledge.
And there were huge investment in Europe to large infrastructures. Here you can see some schemas of some big project which were or are financed.
There is data by AFR cloud demeter. So there is number of such solution but till now it's necessary to find the way how this solution will be.
Again self-financing and how we will guarantee that this platform will be operational after end of the project and what we can do to deliver better services for farmers. Yes, there is large investment, many application is highly fragmented.
There is a lot of apps developed on the top of solution but they are not integrated on all information. There is an urgent need to combine private and public investment to be able to better use the data and also supported better discovery of the data.
We have very good catalogues for primary data. But what for example is not solved is to have such good description for the data which are derived because it
is necessary to understand which methods was used for this type of analysis, how it was analyzed, what was putting data. And there is still now the gap which has to be overcome in the future.
So as I mentioned in the beginning that both Europe and United Nations are looking on a sustainable environmentally friendly production and the plans are ambitious and what is important that this environmental task must be integrated with agriculture production.
But then again question how this has to be financed and how this could be proceed. A lot of we look on precision farming and what I would like also
stress here that if we are speaking about environmental protection and about the methods, till now the most often precision farming is understand as method of this variable rate application to recognize
where I have to put fertilizer, where I have to put more and when I have to put less. What is very important is to look on the timing because we already recognize that for example for nitrogen the good
timing can lead to better usage of nutrients by crops and also reducing the losses to the water to the soil.
So it is important to be able to support also this. Other topic is that in some way is important as I already mentioned this precision farming with other activity and to run some public-private partnership to reach the goals.
So because for financial institute, for public sector, for all is important to guarantee the more environmental friendly production and then it is necessary to how different organizations can cooperate
and aggregated demand for earth observation data to be possible to reduce the cost of the production and to be able to deliver to the farmer services in the cost which will be acceptable for them because for
every farmer is important that its benefit has to be bigger from some services and what they will pay for the services. As I already mentioned, we need to support better fire principles for accessing of the data and we need to collect this provence information about the origin of the data.
And there is some recommendations from AO4Agri and also this, my presentation here is partly connected with this recommendation is to organize regular workshops and conferences where different stakeholders will discuss how they can cooperate.
We need to support cooperation of these different players from public and private sector. In the research, we need to combine the multi-actor approach research because very often something is
developed by IT experts or earth observation experts but if they are not included agronomists, they are not included experts from all areas, we never can come to the result which will really help. So, we need to support fire principles and new metadata models.
We need to look on the usage of previous solution and I think that here is also, if we are on the Phospho-G, very important that in many cases the solution are based on open sources and that usage of open sources can also lead to the better of usage of open source.
Of existing solution and their extension, sometimes they are financed very huge project but to bring something new, new methods
probably can come from smaller project and we need also to have some financing and some instruments for supporting smaller projects. What is very important and one of the key issues is standardization because we need to make information standardized but we need also to have more light standards.
Many of the previous standards is very heavy and it is different to use this by, for example, non -GI specialists to use this standard so we need to go much more to light APIs to be possible.
We need to build a new solution where we cooperate with different experts from different areas and what is important to try to organize some coordination action or from public money or on the base of some organization where people will try and put effort together.
As was mentioned, I am part of OGC and we are now trying inside OGC to have a regular meeting and discuss how different organizations can cooperate and of course the biggest problem on all levels is legislation and financing in Europe.
It will require some include into the reform of common agriculture policy but we need also to have the action in the global scale because we
need now to help also to the other countries better use this as observation data for both for reducing the power and making better food production.
Here you can see the team of organization which participate on this study and all our materials or our report are publicly available or on the web pages of the AgriProject or they are also on ResearchGate publicly available.
So anybody who will be interested about our work in the more details, you can go there or contact me and I will share with you our information.
Thank you very much Karel. That was a very interesting presentation on the thing that we can do for agriculture with our observation. We have a little time left for questions and we already have a question in the chat asking you how will the farmers receive or
access the processed EU data, processed data of the US services using a mobile, a tablet app or it will be given in a periodic report. I think that or what we recognize that farmers are using computer, mobile app but what is important that
there is some local service provider who is able to integrate this different data, not only data from Earth observation but for example from machinery and who is able to deliver this to the farmer as the services. And usually farmers like also not only access the services but if you are able to communicate with
them, you are able to explain them why for example they have to put more or less fertilizer. So it is really important to solve this question of this last mile because there is many ideas that we
will build some market place for application from the farmers but usually this is not where us farmers are working. I think they need to have some trust and they like to have local, original organization which are helping them, which are making for them services and this is I think the way how we can access the farmers.
As for example idea that farmers will go directly on their platform. I know such farmers, yes, but I think that in Czech Republic 5, 6 it is all, yes.
So there is necessary that there is anybody who is doing this services for them and working with them but also it is much better if it is some service organization where farmers are used to work with them. If you will go as Earth observation expert or as IT person to the farmers,
they will be not trusted. They need to speak with anybody who has agriculture knowledge. Exactly. We have another question for you. Aside from payment for Earth observation information, what is the next biggest barrier to Earth observation information for farmers?
One barrier is that this optical satellite are not very often available during the season. Yes, because Sentinel-2 or Kermatic Maper, for example, this season in Czech Republic we had only
few images which we are able to use and farmers need to have information in the time. And on other side, for example, our group is trying to work with Sentinel-1 but till now the work with Sentinel-1 is not so advanced and not so often but this is the way what can be used.
Other topic is that I mentioned that this scale of the farm, usually Landsat data or Sentinel data are good for the fields bigger than 5 hectares. If you have small fields, there is again a limitation. Of course, we have Maxar, we have Planet and
other data provider but there to be possible to deliver services in the cost which will be acceptable for farmers. There is necessary to provide aggregation of this information and aggregation of the demand
for this information and to be able to cover the cost from more sources. Yes, it could be not only from the farmers but I mentioned from the food producer or other. So there is necessary to build new models of this public-private partnership to combining different requests and to reuse one data for more purposes.
Alright, thank you very much for all the context. We can take another question if you have it. We will go over a bit until our next presenter might connect.
So if you have another question for Karel, please use this opportunity to ask it now. If not, we included Karel's contact here. If he allows us, we can direct users to directly ask other questions about your work.
Yes, of course, I am ready to speak and if there is interest to publish my presentation, I can send this presentation and I am trying to have all my work publicly available.
So I don't know if Phosphogee will publish the presentation or how it has to be. I can send my presentation and also use this video recording, I agree to publish this.
Thank you, Karel. For everybody that's listening to us, all the presentations will be shared in a stream format so far. I'm not sure exactly what the policy is for the presentation in another format, but all these streamings are recorded and will
be released in a few weeks from now when everything is going to be edited and put together in a very streamlined way. So thank you very much, Karel. We don't have any other questions in the chat, but thank you for joining us and presenting.