A European regulatory context
Under the regulations governing the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), each Member State (MS) of the European Union is required to introduce "a digital nutrient management tool for sustainable agriculture" for use by farmers. From January 2020 to May 2022, PwC was contracted by the European Commission to work on a pilot project to develop the FaST platform. They worked on the development of the platform's common architecture and integrated a series of specific features from the Member States participating in the project on a voluntary basis. The features of this decision-support platform include automatic data integration, interoperability, modularity, bi-directional communication, data confidentiality and security.
The first prototype of a Walloon FaST platform
Wallonia has joined the second phase of the European pilot project from June 2021 to May 2022, leading to a first Walloon prototype including :
- the farmer logs in via his identity and the automated import of his parcels data (contours and crop type) from Pac-on-Web, avoiding double encoding;
- Walloon map layers useful for nutrient management (nitrate vulnerable zones, hydrographic network, Natura 2000 zones and orthophotos);
- regulatory information on nitrogen input limits according to vulnerability to nitrates;
- a nitrogen fertilisation recommendation tool based on the balance sheet method supplied by REQUASUD ;
and also :
- weather data supplied via API by the Agromet platform;
- satellite imagery (RGB and NDVI) adapted to Walloon conditions by UCLouvain ;
- an first add-on for transferring data to the BELCAM third-party platform so that farmers can easily benefit from other useful services.
An agreement between Walloon stakeholders to develop the platform…
To support the development of the Walloon platform, the SPW Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment has decided to fund the CRA-W and UCLouvain.
The CRA-W was responsible for coordinating the project, as well as researching and developing concrete IT solutions to feed and improve the FaST platform by integrating all the information and tools needed for good nutrient management, whether in arable or livestock farming. In particular, this involved improving the tool dedicated to nitrogen (N) fertilisation in field crops and researching and integrating tools for managing nitrogen fertilisation in grassland and phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) fertilisation.
UCLouvain was responsible for integrating the satellite images, which are updated in real time to give farmers information on the state of their crops and meadows, as well as an assessment of their intra-field heterogeneity.
... And end up with :
Wallonia's involvement in the European FaST pilot project and the FaST Convention have enabled it to be one of the first European regions to meet the requirement to set up a digital nutrient management tool for farmers. The Convention has enabled many improvements to be made to the FaST platform and highlighted numerous areas for improvement.
The activities carried out include
● Tests of the application by farmers, which revealed a number of important technical issues to be resolved and gathered a great deal of interesting information that should be used in future developments of the FaST platform.
● Improvements to the fertilisation plan, the central element of the FaST application. In addition to the module dedicated to nitrogen in arable crops (improved during the Convention), it now includes a module for nitrogen fertilisation in grassland, based on the Protect’eau FertiPrairie tool, improved by the CRA-W, and a module for phosphate fertilisation (REQUAFERTI P), based on the work of the REQUASUD P-K-Mg fertilisation working group.
● The review of connected field notebooks in Wallonia, which led to the proposal of important recommendations to be taken into account when setting up such a tool. It has served as a reminder of the extent and importance of the landscape of digital tools in Wallonia, in which a platform like FaST fits, and the importance of interconnections between platforms.
The FaST application, initially designed in response to new European requirements, is now an operational tool to be tested on a larger scale by farmers and to gather their opinion, which is essential making it an application that meets their needs. It should be open to the public from January 2025.
Financing
● SPW ARNE - DPEAI
● European Commission