As the coordinating institution of the Leibniz Innovation Farm for Sustainable Bioeconomy which is being implemented as an interdisciplinary research infrastructure on a practical agricultural farm, we at ATB are really looking forward to applying the solutions which will be set forth by the FAIRagro consortium: FAIRagro is addressing challenges that all research institutions in agriculture face at the moment such as the existing momentum of digitisation processes and accompanied increase in data availability but missing data standards and reachability. Hence, we see that all this gathered information can – at the time being – not be put to full use in the wide interdisciplinary scientific community. We are looking forward to getting a chance of implementing the Innovation Farm as a bridge use case at later stages of FAIRagro when basic proofs of concept such as data standards and workflows have been provided. Integrating the forthcoming Innovation Farm’s research data on livestock and feed production as well as on residue management into and making them available via the FAIRagro Portal using the above mentioned standards will surely bring us all a step forward to the goal of a more circular agriculture. As an interdisciplinary initiative, we would like to highlight the training and dissemination activities among the many important tasks that FAIRagro is planning. These will surely help to overcome barriers by raising awareness of discipline-specific data handling habits and by aligning them.

Soil is an important production factor in agriculture and is under strong pressure. We have the ability to affect the various soil functions such as storage, filtering, habitat and the impact of soil on climate change. At my institution, we study soil organic matter using the most advanced methodologies. In doing so, we generate excellent data as a basis for further studies of, for example, the role of soil in the global carbon cycle. Research that relates to large scales is impossible for us to perform with our own data in isolation. We are more and more dependent on data from other institutions with which we cooperate. Especially in soil science, there is still some backlog in terms of providing and reusing research data. With the BonaRes Repository, things have improved in recent years and we have a good infrastructure through which we can publish our data and thus make them available to the scientific community, but this possibility is still used by too few scientists. FAIRagro offers a unique opportunity to a) make data publication in repositories even more user-friendly; b) find data that lie dormant in other repositories; and c) further increase awareness and willingness to publish research data among the soil science community.

FAIRagro is an exciting initiative that represents a tremendous opportunity for agrosystems research. Soils and their data are not only a window into agricultural use over the past 10000 years, but they are also urgently needed to guide and improve future use. Soil data, the basis of many groundbreaking academic studies, have been collected and stored for a long time. The INSPIRE directive in 2007 was a key step in making these data treasures available to the European community. My goal is to use the experience with the already established INSPIRE standard to improve data sharing in the scientific community. Additional soil data can be made interoperable and thus increased in their value. The provision of standardized soil data offers enormous potential for research, which has so far only been partially exploited. For example, the BonaRes repository provides INSPIRE metadata and is "GDI-DE ready". I can very well imagine continuing the existing good cooperation in the BonaRes project (www.bonares.de) and would like to participate in FAIRagro Use Cases. The BGR soil data products are ready.

I work at the University of Bonn as the head of a junior research group in the DFG Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob and am involved in field trials on, among other things, mixtures, resource efficiency and ecosystem services. I am also involved in the Dikopshof continuous fertilization trial. In this respect, I have links to use case 1 of FAIRagro. We are also involved in BonaRes and upload data in the repository. Furthermore, I am involved in non-invasive phenotyping and e.g. ground truthing of drone data. This is related to use case 5 of FAIRagro. Based on data published in BonaRes and similar data bases I model plant growth with mathematical process-based simulation models. For the modeling of plant growth I need curated field data sets, raw data are of little use in this context. Collecting and preparing these myself costs time and money. Therefore, I like to reuse data that is already collected and curated. In order to be able to reuse other people's data sets, I ask my colleagues, either face-by-face or by e-mail. I receive datasets by email or via the university's cloud. I also share my own data from field trials with colleagues. The problem is the high effort for the preparation: everyone works with their own structure for a tabular documentation in Excel. It takes a long time to merge these, to make arrangements, etc. This effort is often only made when a text publication is due, for which I need the data. To improve this process I would like to have a content-structured database that everyone uses from the beginning. Then there would be no more time-consuming merging afterwards for the modelers. Here I see a starting point for FAIRagro in my use case. To make it as easy as possible for the researchers, Excel (or a free alternative) should be used, since everyone uses this. Some students prefer to use open programs like Libre Office. Also, it would be helpful for us to have an automatic check routine for quality checking raw data, for example to find outliers. Here FAIRagro could also support. Overall, I can imagine contributing my use case to a call from FAIRagro to get money for harmonizing data collection and data preparation. At least a student assistant would already be very supportive here.

The current challenges in agriculture can probably only be overcome with overall systemically oriented solutions. With Spot Farming, the JKI has developed a new crop production concept that shows what future sustainably intensified crop production could look like, taking social and ecological concerns into account. In order to turn Spot Farming from a concept into reality, a great deal of expertise and data is required, as it involves the consideration of the entire system with all its facets at the most diverse levels. The JKI is generating large amounts of data in order to answer questions like how different variety traits in equidistant and drilled sowing affect plant development and health, resilience and yield potential. The data will be used to establish new breeding targets and also as a basis for other institutions interested in this concept. On the other hand, due to its complexity, the spot farming concept requires access to data, research results and the collaboration of other institutions to fill the existing gaps in the many facets of the approach. This is where we see the FAIRagro portal as a great opportunity. On the one hand, to introduce the spot farming concept as a possible use case and thus make it available and, on the other hand, to strengthen interdisciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration via the possibilities of FAIRagro.

I prepare and coordinate statutory plant health risk analyses at the Julius Kühn Institute for National and International Plant Health. An important topic of my research is the assessment of the risk of introduction and spread, the pest potential and the impact of plant pests including invasive alien species on plant health and biodiversity. The planned activities in Use Case 3 to improve research data management on pests and yields are also highly relevant to our work. Better accessibility and usability of relevant data can help us to better assess the risks of plant pests, including economic and ecological damage, and the effects on ecosystem services. Our good networking at international level within the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC), the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) help to link FAIRagro's activities internationally.