CNH Industrial Is Recognized by the European Commission's Innovation Radar for Its Work on Data Interoperability in Agriculture

Every aspect of modern daily life generates significant quantities of data. Sometimes overwhelming amounts. And this data is only of value when it can be read, understood and then employed for useful purposes. This principal applies equally to family life as it does to agriculture. And this is precisely what inspired CNH Industrial, together with the consortium of industry and academic partners, including AGCO, 365FarmNet, Agrointelli, Wageningen University & Research, Kverneland, with the support of the European Commission within the framework of the IoF2020 scheme, to develop an open source data exchange methodology to promote interoperability in agriculture.

This area is exceptionally complex, as it requires collaboration between different stakeholders to be effective – in essence all systems need to communicate using a common language. And even before this common language is developed, standards for data communication and transfer were required. This is where AgGateway – a standardization organization for agricultural e-business – stepped in, and developed the open-source ADAPT framework to be a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for this agricultural data. This framework allows agricultural data, which is in different formats, to be deciphered and ensures there is a common way to describe field operations.

The Farm Machine Interoperability use case in the IoF20202 EU project, which CNH Industrial co-lead with Aarhus University, solved these problems by accelerating the adoption of interoperability standards – which also saw progress towards the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), 12 (Responsible Production and Consumption) and 13 (Climate Action).

In order to further develop this for the real world, CNH Industrial, with the support of Wageningen University & Research, was instrumental in developing the GeoJSON ADAPT plug-in –created during the IoF2020 project under the Farm Machine Interoperability use case. It is this very plug-in which has received recognition by the European Union’s Innovation Radar. The Innovation Radar is a European Commission initiative to identify high potential innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. The goal is to allow every citizen, public official, professional and business people to discover the outputs of EU innovation funding and give them a chance to seek out innovators.

Currently, each equipment manufacturer uses their own ‘language’ to export data from field machines, making it difficult to owners of multiple fleets and other software packages to be able to analyse it, and ultimately enable farmers to draw conclusion from this data.

This new plug-in allows geospatial agricultural data to be deciphered in easily readable and manageable files, is available as open source and has been given to the AgGateway ADAPT community. The GeoJSON ADAPT plug-in, can process different communication languages used by various agricultural companies through the ADAPT framework, and converts them into the GeoJSON standardized format which can be read by a whole range of machines, agricultural and even non-agricultural software platforms. This makes it an enabler for both online, real time communication and offline communication. Furthermore, the data tools which have been developed are especially beneficial to programmers who have no former background in agricultural data management, thereby lowering the entry level for the average data scientist or engineer who wishes to become involved in the agricultural data space.

The GeoJSON ADAPT plug-in can be found at https://github.com/ADAPT/GeoJSONPlugin.

To find out more about IoF2020 Use Case: Farm Machine Interoperability watch the following video.