ExpectedOutcome:
A successful proposal will contribute to the objectives of the Agriculture of Data partnership proposal including the strategic research and innovation agenda. This partnership aims to enhance climate, environmental and socio-economic sustainability and productivity of agriculture and to strengthen policy monitoring and evaluation capacities through exploiting the potential of Earth and environmental observation and other data, in combination with data technologies.
Proposals are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes (as listed in the partnership document[1]):
- Increased sharing and harmonisation of data across different actors (e.g. scientists, technicians, policymakers, practitioners, businesses, farmers, end users) and countries based to the extent possible on FAIR [2] data principles, and exploitation of synergies through better integration of the digital Earth, environmental observation, space observation and agricultural communities within Europe, transforming both the R&I and economic systems to deliver more and better data-based solutions to the end users;
- Increased environmental, climate and socio-economical sustainability performance of the agriculture sector;
- Enhanced contribution from the agriculture sector to the important need for protecting the environment, halting and, if possible, reversing biodiversity loss in Europe and globally, as well as to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture;
- Enabling the sector and strengthen its capacity to adapt to climate change and to meet the objectives set by sustainability-related policies, considering e.g. risk analyses/indicators, such as environmental, technical, economic or social risks;
- Contribution to creating structures and/or its concept under the umbrella of the partnership Agriculture of Data that includes data infrastructure needed to provide data-based solutions for both policy-making and the agriculture sector (including to strengthening the sector’s economic performance);
- Strengthened capacities to evaluate the effectiveness of policies (with reference to agriculture, environmental- and market-related policies and the combined potential effects of them).
Scope:
Sustainable agricultural production and policy monitoring needs can be supported through the provision of tailored data and data-based solutions; especially, through Earth/environmental observation and in combination with other data and data technologies. At the same time, the agricultural sector at farm level produces data during digitalised farming practises, as also does the public administration. This data can be capitalised to strengthen capacities of the agricultural sector in the public and the private domains. Integrating different sources of data, for instance Copernicus[3] data, precision farming data, Integrated Administration Control System (IACS[4])-data and other reference data, would lead to even more relevant information in this context and provide scope for the development, delivery and uptake of agri-digitalisation products and services, such as decision-making support systems.
Proposals should pool the necessary financial resources from the participating national (or regional) research programmes with a view to implementing joint calls for transnational proposals resulting in grants to third parties.
The successful proposal should:
- Exploit the potential of public and private data, including in the combination with data technologies (including AI) for the agricultural sector in the public and private domain;
- Build on results of existing (ongoing or finished) initiatives and projects;
- Foster EU-wide solutions, scaling up[5] of use-cases and applications close to deployment stage;
- Develop data-based solutions and digital applications in support of achieving the expected impacts of the partnership;
- Consider the necessary technical systemic elements related to e.g. digital and data infrastructure and interoperability;
- Demonstrate how the expected result contribute to the European Green Deal objectives and the ambition of better policy-making[6];
- Demonstrate how it will align to the ongoing work of the Horizon Europe partnership on Agriculture of Data and the projects granted under call HORIZON-CL6-2022-GOVERNANCE-01-11: Upscaling (real-time) sensor data for EU-wide monitoring of production and agri-environmental conditions[7].
A successful proposal is expected to explore the potential for achieving synergies with relevant topics/ projects, partnerships and/ or missions particularly within Cluster 6 and Cluster 4 of the Horizon Europe programme, as well as with the digital Europe programme, the EU space programme and the common agricultural policy.
The strategic research and innovation agenda for the partnership on agriculture of data will give further guidance on possible specific elements to be addressed within the proposal.
The Commission envisages to include new actions in its future work programmes to provide continued support to the partnership for the duration of Horizon Europe.
Specific Topic Conditions:
The total indicative budget for the duration of the partnership is EUR 100 million.
[1]https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/research_and_innovation/funding/documents/ec_rtd_he-partnership-agriculture-data.pdf
[2]https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/
[3]https://www.copernicus.eu/en
[4]https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farming-fisheries/key-policies/common-agricultural-policy/financing-cap/financial-assurance/managing-payments_en
[5]Scaling up should be considered as both the scaling up in TRL or scaling up in geographical outreach
[6]https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/planning-and-proposing-law/better-regulation-why-and-how_en
[7]https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-cl6-2022-governance-01-11
