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.
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.