The German Union of the Potato Sector (UNIKA) and the University of Applied Sciences Kiel are investigating this question in a joint project.
The project is financially supported by the ‘Landwirtschaftlichen Rentenbank’ (the German development agency for agribusiness and rural areas). The aim of the project is to develop uniform digital documentation based on the example of crop protection and to subsequently test its usability in practice at two potato cultivation companies.
“The documentation of measures, be it to fulfill legal regulations or to meet contract requirements, is nothing new for the potato sector,” said Dr. Rolf Peters, chairman of the UNIKA technical committee. “The data is often still entered manually. However, digital solutions could help to reduce the documentation burden”, Dr. Peters is convinced. “In our project, manual data entry will be avoided as much as possible. At the same time, processes that run in the background, such as the use of current plant protection product databases, aim to achieve a clear reduction in the documentation burden.”
The degree of digitization within companies is very different. “In our project, we are therefore working with two companies that stand out in terms of their experiences in the field of digitization”, says Prof. Dr. Yves Reckleben, who is supervising the project on behalf of the Hogeschool Kiel. “With the project, we want to use the concrete example of crop protection in potato cultivation to document both the technical feasibility and the simple integration within the business processes,” says Reckleben. “Ultimately, it must be demonstrated whether and what added value digital solutions can offer in documentation and data provision in the field of crop protection. The use in practice is always in the foreground.”
For more information:
Union der Deutschen Kartoffelwirtschaft eV
www.unika-ev.de
