AHDB Appoint Agrimetrics as Data Innovation Partner

AHDB has embarked on a project to make their data work harder for levy payers. To support this vital work, they have commissioned Agrimetrics as a strategic data innovation partner. The project will run from January 2021 to December 2022.

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Core to AHDB’s Change Programme and Strategy 2021-2026 is bringing more data, insight and analysis together in an easy-to-use format to help farmers, growers and supply chains make better business decisions. Their goal is to be a leader in the provision of data to improve agricultural decision making.

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“We’re aiming to make our data work much harder for levy payers,” says Simon Oxley, Head of Crop Production Systems at AHDB. “A clear winner for the industry lies in AHDB’s wealth of data in varieties, and crop monitoring which will be the foundation for future collaborations in integrated pest management practices, for weeds, diseases and insect pests, and their impact on improving farm businesses.”

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AHDB delivers research, knowledge exchange activities and services, which create a diverse range of technical datasets. Most datasets are collected for a specific activity and comprise data from many different sources which are aggregated and delivered for a specific farmer-focused service or web tool.

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FAIR data that works for levy payers

Key to making AHDB’s data work harder for levy payers will be to make FAIR data improvements: an acronym for making the data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. To achieve this, Agrimetrics will apply classifications to AHDB’s data in a way that makes it far easier for humans and machines to find it, combine it and turn it into value.

Agrimetrics will bring their expertise and technology to bear in helping AHDB derive better value from these disparate datasets, both for levy payers and internal users. This will include developing a common data classification system and working to discover, classify and provide greater access to diverse technical and market intelligence datasets from across all six sectors of AHDB.

When the project concludes in 2022, users of AHDB’s datasets will be able to extract more valuable insights and make far greater use of the huge data resources that the organisation holds. Agrimetrics will work in collaboration with AHDB on two pilot programmes in the cereals and pork sectors that will show proof of concept of the added value that AHDB can provide to levy payers by integrating datasets.

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Future-proofing AHDB

Agrimetrics will also conduct Horizon Scanning to provide greater insight and understanding of future data technologies from agriculture and other industries that are likely to become mainstream over the next five to 10 years. This knowledge will be essential to fully realise the potential of AHDB’s data assets and unlock the maximum value for the sector.

“As an organisation developing an advanced Data Marketplace for richly annotated agrifood data, Agrimetrics must stay abreast of the latest innovations to deliver a cost-effective evergreen service,” says Dr Matthew Smith, Chief Product Officer at Agrimetrics. “Horizon Scanning is part of our culture and we’re delighted to be able to support AHDB in ensuring they’re at the forefront of embracing future data innovations.”

“Agrimetrics’s extensive knowledge of emerging data technologies from the agricultural sector as well as related industries make them a natural partner for this task,” concludes Dr Matthew Smith.

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About Agrimetrics

Agrimetrics is the food and farming sector’s Data Marketplace. We enable organisations to safely share and monetise their data, whilst making it easier for data-consumers to access the information they need. Our goal is to help create a more productive and sustainable food system by enabling next-generation solutions as quickly and affordably as possible.

We are one of four centres for agricultural innovation founded with an initial investment from Innovate UK. Our founding partners are NIAB, SRUC, Rothamsted Research and The University of Reading. We have strategic partnerships with Airbus and Microsoft and are a participant in Microsoft’s prestigious AI for Earth programme.

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The four centres
The Agri-Tech Centres are a unique collaboration between Government, academia and industry created to drive greater efficiency, resilience and wealth across the agrifood sector. A £90m investment from the UK’s strategic innovation agency (Innovate UK) is enabling the Centres to harness leading UK research and expertise as well as build new infrastructures and innovation. They include CHAP (Crop Health and Protection), CIEL (Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock), Agri-EPI (Engineering and Precision Technologies), and Agrimetrics.

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