Strategic Advisory Group Report on Smart Farming: Final Report with Recommendations

Introduction

This document presents the final report and recommendations from the ISO Strategic Advisory Group on Smart Farming (SAG SF). It identifies key challenges, opportunities, and relevant standards within the context of smart farming and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This report serves as a roadmap for future ISO action and provides guidance for standards development in data-driven agrifood systems. It is intended for ISO technical committees, policymakers, and stakeholders in the agricultural industry.

Key Insights

Definition of Smart Farming

Smart Farming is defined as:

data-driven, principled decision making in agricultural and food value chains occurring as multi-objective optimization in the context of global volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. (p. 5)

This definition considers the factors of producers looking for more efficient ways to grow food and raise livestock in the face of climate change, regulatory pressure, changes in consumer preferences, increasing cost of inputs, commodity price volatility and an increasingly complex geopolitical situation.

General Recommendation 3.1.4: ISO Smart Farming Coordinating Committee

The SAG recommends that the ISO/TMB establish an ISO Smart Farming Coordinating Committee (SFCC). The Terms of reference include:

• Oversee the implementation of ISO/TMB SAG-SF General Recommendations 3.1.6, 3.1.7 and 3.1.8.
• Identify cases of coordination needed among various ISO committees on new or existing projects
• Make recommendations to the committees and/or ISO/TMB for action.
• Work with ISO Communications on the implementation of ISO/TMB SAG-SF General Recommendation 3.1.3
• Pursue families-based methodology for finding intra-standard gaps. (Clause 6.3.3)

The Gap/Rationale:

The development of ISO smart-farming digital agriculture standards requires precise coordination among a diverse set of stakeholders, including committees (p. 14)

Recommendation 3.2.1: Technical Committee on Data-Driven Agrifood Systems

The SAG-SF recommends that the ISO/TMB implement the process to consider forming a Technical Committee to develop and maintain standards in the field of data-driven agrifood systems.

The scope is the big-picture, data-driven, principled-decision-making, multi-objective optimization perspective of smart farming, not currently covered anywhere else within the ISO structure. (p. 19)

Recommendation 3.4.1: Enable conformance assessment of FAIR Data Principles

The SAG recommends that ISO launch a project to develop an international standard(s) for assessing the conformance of data, data exchange, and data exchange processes to the principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR).

Preserving the meaning of data in agriculture is an ongoing problem; agricultural management processes are plagued by the use of metadata-poor comma-separated-values (CSV) files and similar formats. (p. 28)

The Horizon Model

The roadmap for smart farming is divided into three horizons:

• Horizon 1 (6 months to 1 year): Focuses on structural changes, internal coordination, partnerships, and data standards.
• Horizon 2 (1 to 3 years): Aims to close major identified gaps in the current ISO standardization landscape and initiate work on major themes like FAIR data.
• Horizon 3 (3 to 6 years): Continues the recommendation implementation and standardization processes, building upon semantic infrastructure and associated standardization.

Key Recommendation Areas

Several key areas for standardization are presented:

• Enable user implementation interoperability.
• Controlled vocabulary and data model for a hierarchical, geopolitical-context-dependent, mappable reference data system to represent actors and their roles in agrifood operations.
• A standard to support data exchange between crop and livestock management systems.
• Standard for representing provenance of agricultural inputs and calculating upstream energy requirements.

Key Statistics & Data

• Smallholder farms (typically <2 hectares) account for 84% of all farms worldwide, operating about 12% of all agricultural land, and are accountable for 35% of the world’s food supply (Marie, 2022).
• Over 30% of the world’s food is lost or wasted at some point from harvest onward, contributing to greenhouse gas production and food insecurity (The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022, UN).

Methodology

This report was produced by the ISO Strategic Advisory Group on Smart Farming (SAG SF) which had over 140 experts from 21 countries, working over 18 months. The SAG used a constructionist approach to define “smart farming,” gathering over 300 topics/scope items from experts (See Annex E.1), and then used these in creating a business capability and maturity model.

Implications and Conclusions

This report provides a roadmap for standardization efforts in smart farming, emphasizing data interoperability and alignment with SDGs. Key implications include:

• A need for new ISO committees and coordinating bodies to address the unique challenges of data-driven agrifood systems.
• An emphasis on developing and implementing standards that enable data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).
• A recognition of the importance of considering smallholder farmers in the development and implementation of smart farming standards.