UC1/US1A Assess soil health performance at parcel or farm level

[pvgenuchten]

I am an environmentally conscious arable/dairy farmer that wants to improve soil health. Besides the fact that I want to contribute to a better world, I’m convinced that this will eventually increase my yields and product quality and that it will help me to comply with regulations and agro-environmental certification requirements, and to qualify for subsidies and rewards. I expect that more and more focus will be on maintaining good soils and that I will benefit from being a frontrunner and being aware when this will be further deployed into certifications, regulations etc. I have a lot of practical knowledge on soil management after being a farmer for more than 15 years, and I think I am already doing well, but I cannot objectively assess it at the moment.

I want to be able to assess how I am performing on the individual parcel and farm level, based on the information I have in my farm management information system and any other data that is available that can help improving this assessment. I would also like to compare my figures to benchmark data, to see how I’m doing compared to similar farms. More specifically, I want to see my performance and progress on soil organic carbon, based on soil samples and my registry of farm management practices over the years. I would also like to benchmark this with representative values from national soil monitoring programmes in areas that are similar to mine.

Currently I am participating in a research pilot where KPIs for circular agriculture are tested. Several soil KPIs are derived for my farm and parcels, based on my farm management data. I get these scores for my farm, and they are also discussed with other farmers in my pilot group. The prospect is that in due time use of such KPIs is going to be scaled out to the whole Dutch agriculture sector, and is going to be a basis for subsidies and rewards for good farm management. As far as I know, the calculation of these KPIs do not yet include data from my soil samples or any more broadly available (open) soil data. I think that including such data can improve the reliable scoring on soil KPIs and would provide additional value both for my farm and for giving insights in how a perform relative to other farms.

So I can provide proof of my good agro-environmental practices for myself and for certification and subsidies,and get rewarded for my efforts. Acceptance criteria:

• I have an overview of soil organic carbon content and related indicators per parcel and aggregated for my farm over the last 5 years
• In the same overview I see the benchmark values for soil organic content and related indicators for similar farms
• I can see the criteria that were used to generate the benchmark values

[chlebas]

To be able to assess how the land manager is performing on the individual parcel and farm level, based on the information he has in his farm management information system, must these data be inserted in the SWR? Must SWR be able to calculate the soil KPIs? But then what will be the link between SWR and the tools developed by other soil mission projects about MRV on soil carbon data (e.g. Marvic, MRV4soil, etc.)?

[KathiSchleidt]

• Unclear what data the farmer has stored locally, is data being provided in the course of this US?

[KathiSchleidt]

Extracted Requirements:

• 01.1 - Data Discovery - Query Catalogue: Spatiotemporal query for specific properties/indicators at a high resolution (datasets with a time series)
• 01.2 - Data Discovery - map preview : overview of a specific property/indicator (map and graphs)
• 01.3 - Data Discovery - chatbot : Obtain information on criteria used to create indicators and benchmarks
• 08 - Vocabulary: Vocabs on SOC
• 11 - Processing: Calculation of Soil KPIs (out-of-scope)