51. Data sharing: a promising harvest for farmers

In this 51st edition of Food for Europe, we are exploring the role that data, and the broader availability of data, can play in making Europe’s agriculture more efficient – and in particular, what it means for farmers and policymakers. Farming has always been an innovative sector – but it’s only in the past decade or so that the enormous potential of digital technology in agriculture has become clear. This episode is all about data sharing and how it works: the upsides, the policy framework and the challenges. Our field report comes from Flanders in Belgium, where we meet Jurgen Vangeyte from the Flanders Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries & Food Research (ILVO) to discuss ILVO’s development of an innovative data-sharing platform, DjustConnect; and we meet Carine Cornu, a farmer in the region whose use of the platform has substantially reduced the time she spends on paperwork. European Commission experts Evangelia Mourmoura and Malte Beyer-Katzenberger provide their perspectives from a policymaking viewpoint on the growth of data sharing in agriculture and the development of a Europe-wide data-sharing space.