Part of ATLAS, DLG's International Crop Production Center (IPZ) used the newly developed system to collect and manage data from selected demonstration farms.
 
Improving productivity while reducing environmental impact, the digital transformation in agriculture is providing farmers with new devices and services, such as sensors and actuators on farm equipment along with weather information, drones, and satellite images. As a result there is now a need for a common data ‘interoperability' network that allows any stand-alone system used on the farm to connect, thus providing one single access point for the farmer.
 
“Many sensor based systems, like the popular ‘nitrogen sensor', come with their own software and, while each system is easy to install and use, there is no overall data platform that pulls all of the results together for a simple overview. This means the farmer has to access each system individually, which not only often takes time but also does not give the farmer the chance to see all the data together. What ATLAS does is to build an open interoperability network to enable any system to provide or retrieve data simply,” says Florian Schiller, project manager digital agriculture, International DLG Crop production Center.
 
Some 30 members from seven European countries in the ATLAS project are developing a new open interoperability network that ensures the free flow of data and that systems from any company are compatible. One of five designated ATLAS ‘innovation hubs', the DLG's International Crop Production Center has been collecting data from demonstration farms and has tested the new data network under real life conditions. With its 600 hectare farm conducting both crop rotations and irrigation trials, the center in this project is responsible for the overall coordination of the ATLAS innovation hubs.

 
As part of the trial, DLG's International Crop Production Center is collecting data from a range of sources:

• Online task management and machine tracking
• Field data management and infield sensor connection
• Target fertilization
• Target crop protection
• Herd management and Livestock behaviour analysis

 “The benefit for the farmer is increased compatibility with all the digital tools he uses. The farmer will no longer encounter the interface incompatibilities that still exist here and there in this sector,” added Schiller.
 
Using the network will result in time savings and increased efficiency, with an additional expected benefit: to enable a market place for data analysis tools that the farmer can then use easily.
 
Technical scope
 
The project is developing an open, distributed, and extensible open interoperability network with a microservice architecture, providing hardware and software interoperability layers which enable the acquisition and sharing of data from a multitude of sensors. It will also provide analysis of this data using a multitude of approaches, enabling innovative, data-driven services in agriculture to help improve the efficiency in a sustainable way.
 
ATLAS Demo Day ‘Business Opportunities for Innovative Digital Data-Driven Agriculture'
 
The ATLAS Demo Day 2021 takes place on 24 November 2021 10.00 am - 1.00 pm as part of the "AGRITECHNICA digital" program on the DLG-Connect platform.
 
Aptly titled ‘Business Opportunities for Innovative Digital Data-Driven Agriculture' the demo day is an opportunity to network with companies and partners from the digital field. The program, which covers presentations with inventive titles like ‘PigstEYE Topic: Behavioural Analysis and Management of Livestock and ‘SWRI Pinios Hydrologic Observatory', offers insight into regional approaches from Greece, Germany to Latvia and Slovenia among others. Participating organizations and companies include Soil & Water Resources Institute-HAO, Fraunhofer IAIS , Exa Computing and Agvolution. A panel discussion titled “is Data the New Oil”, will wrap up the demo day.
 
The ATLAS demo day is organised together with DLG by AZO Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen, an international networking and branding company for European space programs, supporting entrepreneurship with more than 700 company foundations in Europe.
 
Further information, the complete programme and the registration form can be found at www.atlas-h2020.eu/atlas-demo-day-2021.

About DLG
 
DLG (German Agricultural Society), a non-profit organization with over 30,000 members, in 2010 set up the DLG International Crop Production Centre, a 600-hectare site conducting plot trials on crop rotations, cultivation, irrigation and machinery tests. The results are shared with farmers.
 
About ATLAS
 
ATLAS runs for 36 months with 30 partners from seven European countries: Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Latvia. The ATLAS consortium's test sites include 13 agricultural operations at different geographical locations in Europe, with a variety of farm sizes and farming goods produced. Of these, five are purely research farms, six are commercial farms, and two are combined research/commercial farms. The pilot studies will be carried out at five Innovation Hubs at the test sites in close collaboration with end users. ATLAS is bringing together an excellent combination of stakeholders that have been active in the automation, IoT, and robotics sectors since before the term “smart farming” was even coined. The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS, Germany) is coordinating the project.