Newsletter #6 – October 2024
October Edition – Welcome
Dear Readers,
We hope you enjoyed a relaxing summer and returned fully energised and motivated! We are pleased to present the October edition of the AgriGuide Newsletter, highlighting:
- Our efforts to meet the proposed PPP labelling regulations
- Enhancements to our technical platform and label models
- Enhancements to our web and mobile applications
We appreciate your continued interest and welcome you to join us on this exciting journey.
Best regards
The AgriGuide Team
Stepping up the pace
In our last Newsletter, we talked about the draft regulation that will replace the existing regulation on PPP labelling 547/2011. This draft of the new regulation focuses on updates for physical labels but also establishes the future existence of digital machine-readable labels.
Aware of the need to adapt our AgriGuide roadmap to meet this new regulation:
❑ The AgriGuide team presented an accelerated roadmap to the CropLife Europe Board of Directors. This proposal received full support from the Board, reaffirming its commitment to the project.
❑ To support this accelerated process, multiple webinars will be held with all key stakeholders to explain the process and answer any questions they may have
❑ A comprehensive Playbook has been published to help National Industry Associations and individual companies who have already joined or wil join the AgriGuide journey. This Playbook covers:
- Key project phases and tasks
- Main aspects of AgriGuide implementation
- Best practices and lessons learned from our pilot programme
This will be a living document, regularly updated to reflect the latest information and insights gained as we progress.
News from the technical teams
Core platform updates
The AgriGuide label information model has been revised to v1.0. The phased release of updates has brought these v1.0 changes through the platform. We now have reference data, label input management, connected Data Graphs label authoring instances and the web and mobile apps revised in line with the new model version. Further updates are planned over the coming months following our now-standard pattern of monthly change review and platform release cycles. Alongside this platform update the documentation has been revised, and a knowledge base has been created alongside the original model schema and model guide documents.
Maturing development processes
Over the last few months the technical team has put processes and tools in place to make delivery of updates more predictable. At the heart of our development ecosystem is Jira, allowing us to manage “tickets”, items for development and issues to be resolved. These can be organised into themed groups or ‘epics’, tagged for areas of development including releases (R1.0 and R1.5) and planning for scale-out across countries. These groupings, tags and views help us make sense of a complicated project and decide what to prioritise for delivery in our next monthly iteration. They also help us with our longer-term planning and this maturing capability is vital for our work.
Planning for scaling out across EU27 and for Release 1.5 (Electronic Record Keeping)
The team is elaborating plans for how we will scale out AgriGuide across the remaining EU27 countries. Although this involves simply replicating what has been done for the three pilot countries, we have to be able to do it very efficiently, so we can cover 24 countries in 14 months. Key to this scale out is our small team of reference data experts who will help us align crop and pest names, growth stages and other controlled vocabularies.
Digitisation of labels
An AgriGuide implementation partner supporting label digitisation, Molecular Connections has created a workbench to support digitisation and quality control reviews. The QC workbench has been updated to align with model v1.0. We currently have more than 200 labels published on our AgriGuide platform and approximately 70 farmers in our 3 pilot countries testing it.
Web/Mobile Application
In close relationship with users, we have delivered a new version of the application which enhances customer experience. In a nutshell, this new Build 29 Web/Mobile Application encompasses:
- New data model V1.0 has been implemented to unlock additional functionality in Product use instructions,
- Phone number rendering has been improved with a particular focus on emergency number,
- Information related to product “Mode of Action” have been transfer from the “Formulation” section to “Resistance Information”.
- In all labels section, empty fields are no longer showing up, improving views and readability of key information.
AgriGuide: What’s Next
CropLife Europe will be present at the upcoming Congress of European Farmers and AgriGuide will be promoted and the app demonstrated at the CLE stand. Romania being one fof the 3 pilot countries for AgriGuide, the team will be meeting with Romanian farmers to listen to their experiences and challenges and gather feedback on their usage of the AgriGuide app.
AgriGuide team members engage with ISO Technical Committee 347 (TC 347 – data-driven agrifood systems)
Following the publication in February 2023 of the ISO Strategic Advisory Group report on “smart farming”, or “data-driven agrifood systems”, TC 347 has been set up, with a number of national mirror committees. Several AgriGuide project members are engaging with TC 347 to support the work and connect it to the aims of the AgriGuide project. We already have links through France (AFNOR), Germany (DIN) and UK (BSI) to subgroups working on integrated pest management (ad hoc group AHG 4, IPM), communications (advisory group AG1), crop model (AHG2) and stakeholder engagement (AG2). Several of us are also taking part in the virtual international workshop series to build an initial reference architecture. If you are wondering why we are involved in such a technical and obscure-sounding series of committees, it’s that we are aiming to learn from other experts and align with structures and standards that are being created across the agriculture and food sectors. By working together we hope to build for the long term.