eFarmer ~ CAP-related and Country-specific eContent Management

1. eFarmer ~ CAP-related and Country-specific eContent Management SZIE eFarmer Research Group Professional Contribution to the Project EFITA/WCCA Joint Conference 2005Vila Real, Portugal, 26-28 July 2005

2. Project Objectives • Strategic objective: Improving and enhancing the flow of information within CAP, relating to various aid (priorities: SAPS, national top-up and LFA) options from state administration to farmers of V-4 countries. • Technical objective: Implementing user friendly eCMS and form flow generator modules to support efficient and sustainable CAP content transformation. • Supplementary objectives: • Introduction of web services to assist farmers • Electronic claim submission using eFarmer content (rules, manuals, form templates, etc.) as input source, • Establishment of pilot groups of eFarmer user network demonstrating eFarmer content communication services for farmer community. Based on: eFarmer project documentation

3. Business Model Source: eFarmer project documentation

4. Members of the project consortium

5. Tasks of SZIE Research Group • CAP- and CoAP-specific content transformation (emphatic parts: SAPS, national top-ups and LFA): • Exploring, extracting and structuring the primary information sources in the EU and Hungary. • Exploring the needs of the potential users • Developing the additional value-added services • Isolating the generic and country-specific aspects of content management (Almost every kind of knowledge items/services - like data-visualisation based on FAO- and FADN-services, usergroup-specific document services – might have both generic and country-specific character.)

6. Generic solutions • Classes of potential primer content (numeric data, text, multimedia objects): • Textual: e.g. press monitoring for V4-related news • Textual: e.g. official documents of aid claiming • Numeric: e.g. FADN-, MIS-, FAO-, CAPRI-data for benchmarking • Multimedia: e.g. online stored fragments of radio broadcasting, movie-clips of TV broadcasting • Appearance of this content: • User group-specific document/data providing (a special kind of newsletters – edited by experts) • Online reports (data visualisation – pre-defined and/or self-structured)

7. Information value-added In a content management project, extra utility (information value-added) can be established through: • Saving of time: the necessary documents/data can be found quicker through integration of relevant items. • Enhanced comprehensiveness of results: all relevant documents/data can be found through systematic exploring of items. • Enhanced reliability of results: the overall quality of documents is better trough checking of different sources.

8. Legitimation • Information sources (research institutes, professional journals etc.): The strategy (integrating and structuring) is acknowledged and supported. • Information and Extension System Providers („mediators”): • Automated claim submission on the base of detailed (official) farm data for accounting for „large-scale” farms already covered, real assistance is needed: GAEC, traceability, QA, cross compliance • Supporting accounting and planning for small farmers is non-existing yet (despite of general prescription) • Primary users (potential efarmers, farmers, authorities, labour organisations): The experiences coming from questionnaires are (will be) taken into account during the development process.

9. Providing the necessary information for the cross-compliance, GAEC, QA, traceability and business planning. Development of claiming system is the duty of the government, it should be a public service (cf. Federal state of Hessen) Roles of extension system might be: Guarantee the necessary primary data for IACS-controls (traceability, QA, GAEC, data integration with GIS etc.) Supporting the planning processes (estimation of prices and yields, technology-scenarios, optimisation according to subsidy, GM, income, cost, labour force, etc.) Primary users (farmers, advisors) Stakeholders’ needs IT Service Providers Authorities, public organisations • Completing the extension services by competent experts, • Using PPP-oriented approach.

10. Achievements I - eLibrary • Several thousands of knowledge items (documents, news, multimedia objects, projects, services) are catalogised at this time. • Sources: MARD, PA, CSO, Online Catalogue of Agricultural Research Institutes, IAMO, fnsea news abstracts etc. • Numerous homogeneous knowledge groups (according to e.g. IACS codes, agricultural activities) are set up. • Navigation supporting tools: • Keyword and full-text search • Multi-dimensional document-trees

11. Achievements II – Online reports • Tens of thousands of numeric data is available • Sources: FAO (V4), CAPRI (HUN), FADN (HUN), CSO (HUN), MIS (HUN) • Main services: • Online report wizard (e.g. land usage) • „Offline” pivot table service (e.g. forecasting the stock change of pigs) • Online expert system (e.g. supporting part time farmers in taxation) • „Offline” expert system (e.g. plot selection of sugarbeet production)

12. Conclusion • In the first stage we explored the data-assets of the Hungarian and some of the international agricultural portals within the multi-dimensional content providing framework. • The existing primary information supply of agricultural information sources (as expected) in not equal to the existing/potential needs of farmers. • Therefore, exploring and processing of the primary knowledge items by experts seems to be necessary in the second stage of the project, the main points should be: • Document (e.g. certificates, contracts, invoices) repository of “small” farmers in order to support their detailed accountancy. • GAEC-, traceability-, QA-, cross compliance-based (technology-, or product-specific) information filtering. • Developing expert systems, which are able to support solving typical problems in user-specific way (e.g. availability of certain aid schemes). • Education of efarmers (as information brokers) according to the following principles: • “learning by doing/ tele-coaching”, • “independent structuring of existing knowledge items”, • “independent exploring the new knowledge”.

13. Thank you for your attention! For more information, please, visit: http://miau.gau.hu/efarmer