After taking office, the Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, Julia Klöckner, approached again the issue of digitization and has made it the mission of her ministry: digitization officers in all departments and a digitization officer for the entire house were introduced, a separate Subdivision established for the topic. By 2022, moreover, 60 million euros will have been destined for digitization in agriculture. A significant part of this money is currently being used to establish digital test and experimentation fields, in order to find out in practice how digitalization on the ground can function quite concretely.

Because digital solutions are used in agriculture along the entire value chain. Agricultural machinery, for example, uses seeds and fertilizers and pesticides in a satellite-controlled and precise manner, animal welfare is precisely measured and measured, and transport and storage processes are optimized in this way. They also play a role in the collection of harvest figures, the entire operations management to the tax return. Farmers expect that a smooth exchange of data will be guaranteed without any loss of time between the products of the different producers. Data platforms are gaining importance here.

"Digitalization in agriculture means working more efficiently and better protecting the soil, air and water," says Julia Klöckner. "But their progress also raises questions: Are there suitable interfaces for merging different digital data? Who protects data sovereignty and farmers' independence vis-à-vis service providers or agricultural technology providers? Who collects and uses data and ensures data security? Who owns collected data? It is important to clarify that appropriate data platforms require political monitoring and protection. The feasibility study that I commissioned makes a contribution to this."

The study, commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, examines the following questions:

- How to build a digital data platform in a meaningful way so that the state can best support farmers?

- Which relevant data can be provided to the farmer by the state for free and in a practical (machine-readable) form?

- How do digital data for agriculture look like so that it can be used for different requirements (standards for data formats or open interfaces)?

- What potential does the disclosure of interfaces, for example to countries' digital application systems, offer?

- What data protection measures need to be ensured for state-owned platforms?

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, in particular the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, based in Kaiserslautern, has been awarded the contract to carry out the study, which the Ministry is financing with more than € 400,000. It is titled "Feasibility Study on State-of-the-Art, Digital Data Platforms for Agriculture". Results will be available in autumn 2020.