In Spain, the value of agricultural products produced per year exceeds €60 Billion and it is consistently in the top 5 food producing nations in the EU. By September 1, 2024 , all of Spain's 800,000+ farms will be digitally reporting crop treatments.
The Spanish government is taking a big step to get farms reporting online. At the end of 2022, the government announced that digital reporting for tracking plant protection treatments would be mandatory for every farm in Spain on a monthly basis, effective September 1, 2024. This came as a surprise to many farms, and some struggled to believe that Spain’s 800,000 farms could be ready to switch offline reporting practices to a common online system in less than 2 years. Since 2022, the Spanish Agrarian Guarantee Fund (FEGA) has led a central project called SIEX, which has developed an online platform where farmers can register crop treatments. Growers will know the process as the Cuaderno Digital de Explotación (CUE) or simply translated to the ‘Digital Notebook’. CUE intelligently uses a farm’s unique ID to automatically visualize the farm’s field boundaries to make the reporting processes both easier and less prone to errors.
We all know that change can be hard. We can argue a change in farming practices can be very hard as work processes are often passed down through family relations, meaning traditions easily become a part of the farming mindset.
So how do you get 800,000 farms to change their mindset?
It’s all about incentives. Starting this month, the government of Spain is incentivizing farms to start using the ‘Digital Notebook’ early through a variety of early-adopter benefits; such examples include:
- Priority for CAP subsidy payments, which means you can receive payments earlier than those not using CUE
- Possibilities for farms to access additional subsidies beyond normal levels
- Lower fines from possible violations of product restrictions
- Reimbursement to the farm for the cost of Farm Management Systems (FMS) or similar software tools that support the farm in using digital work processes.
It’s important to credit the SIEX team here as well. Building technology that connects farms in 17 different regions across Spain is no walk in the park, and they deserve to be acknowledged on several points:
- Management of Regional Politics – Agriculture is controlled at the regional level in Spain, so it cannot be underestimated the level of coordination required to achieve alignment and make progress on the SIEX project by all 17 regions.
- Collaboration with Private Sector – more than 90 private businesses were welcomed to participate in the journey with SIEX, including access to test environments for businesses that wanted to integrate their products.
- Go- Live December, 2023 – Just in the past couple of weeks, the SIEX team successfully launched! Meaning their project delivered the digital platform on time for farms to start officially using the platform for the January 2024 CUE submissions and take advantage of the incentives offered by the government for being early adopters.
What’s in it for the farm?
Officially, the main objective of SIEX is to support the farm with the following:
1. Efficient Management of the CAP processes; ensure the efficient management of farm subsidies
2. Simplify farm management for the farmer by allowing the reuse of all the available information to manage their business; ultimately reducing the administrative workload
3. Analysis of information for guiding policies; which upfront sounds like it’s for government teams not the farm. However, the better informed policy makers are with real data from real farms, at scale; the higher hopes we can have that future agri-policy reflects the challenging reality of food production
There is one more critical factor to the success we have seen so far in Spain; FEGA, the team behind SIEX, has clearly understood the long-term importance of the farm shift to digital work processes. A lesser team would have focused simply on the short-term benefit of reduced administration time from the objectives listed above, but FEGA has been pushing this digital transformation as an opportunity for the farm’s long-term economic viability in Spain. In her opening remarks at December 8th, EU Agri-Food Days in Brussels, the President of FEGA, Maria José Hernández Mendoza, openly discussed the importance of harmonised data to prepare farms for the future and that SIEX is a force that will position Spanish farms to be ready for future technologies.
SIEX aims to digitally integrate all available information from the agricultural sector
This is a visionary statement that demonstrates the understanding of what is really happening on Spanish farms in 2024. By mandating the farms to report digitally, FEGA is forcing the industry to take the first uncomfortable but crucially necessary step towards being able to benefit from connected data sources. Three key reasons come to mind as to why this is essential for the future of farming.
1. Farms are businesses
Farms are businesses with many constraints (weather, market pricing, labour availability, etc) which all require optimization to stay profitable. Keeping your farm in business means managing these variables to the best of your ability, and better data will improve decision-making. Accessing integrated data, as SIEX aspires, means putting farms in a position where they can easily access market data or precision weather data for the everyday operations of the farm.
2. Traceability is here to stay.
Like it or not, farms need to respond to the demands of the right-hand side of their supply chain. Wholesalers, retailers, consumers are all demanding more transparency or traceability on how crops are grown. At first glance, this looks like an avalanche of compliance paperwork coming down on top of the farm. The only way to rescue the farm from this avalanche, is to set yourself up to share data securely but seamlessly using technology with other players in the supply chain.
3. Less pesticide usage.
Everyone wants this, in theory. The farm wants to spend less time and money managing pesticides wherever reasonably possible. Society and our respective politicians are manadating the industry to cut pesticide usage; particularly in Europe under the EU Green Deal. Connected data between spray equipment and Farm Management Software can enable techniques such as variable rate spraying, which is arguably the most realistic option for farms to minimise pesticide use while protecting crop yields.
Why is this important beyond Spain?
Spain is trailblazing a path in agriculture that has been challenging for most other nations to make inroads on. First and foremost, their progress is an inspiration to other countries of the potential benefits to the farm when public data infrastructure is designed well and used collaboratively. In the EU, there are already signs that two other nations, Switzerland and Austria, are quickly following suit; each with their own respective projects that parallel SIEX in Spain. Across Europe, we should expect to see this movement gain some momentum, not only for the benefits to the farm mentioned above but also in support of recent EU legislation which requires electronic reporting on crop treatments for all of the EU’s 10 million farms by January 1, 2026.
While farms located outside Europe’s borders may not feel the immediate pressure of legislative change; the need to be future-ready and economically viable in the long-term should serve as incentives for federal agricultural teams to prioritise digital projects. For those nations looking for best practices on how to make progress in digitizing their own farming sector, here are few considerations:
- Interoperability between public and private technology providers is essential. Farmers do not want to deal with many isolated technologies but benefit from integrated solutions.
- Data Ownership remains with the farm, but farms can choose to securely share information with public or private technology providers.
- Communicating the short and long-term benefits of digitization is important to gain real acceptance across different stakeholder groups (farms, policy teams, industry associations, etc.) .
- Awareness and education are needed to build trust and confidence using new technologies, so expect to invest resources in communicating how the farm can adopt digital processes and what the benefits are.
- Motivate change with incentives that create value for the farm.
Millions of people are fed from the output of the 800,000+ farms in Spain. As a global community, we need projects like SIEX to support farms in protecting their own long-term financial viability by being future-ready. The team at FEGA understand this fundamental point. For all our sakes, I hope that by September 2024, the CUE / Digital Notebook has been nothing short of a massive success for Spain. Then we can start looking forward to the second step in the digital journey of Europe’s agriculture industry.
