Agri-machinery expert: EU CAP should go digital to be ‘green and attractive’

The post-2020 EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) should include targeted support measures for farmers to invest in precision farming technologies with proven environmental benefits.

Ulrich Adam is the Secretary General of the European Agricultural Machinery Industry Association (CEMA).

Adam spoke with Sarantis Michalopoulos.

The discussion about the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has begun. Is there room for digital farming? Could it be the “third pillar”?

We need a strong CAP for a strong European agriculture. And, in our view, supporting innovation and the digital transformation in farming should be strong elements of the next CAP. I’m not sure we have to add another pillar for this, particularly at a time when most farmers feel the CAP has grown far too complex already. But we should seriously think about how we could add elements of something like a digital greening scheme.

In other words, devising targeted support measures for farmers in the CAP to invest in technologies like precision or digital farming, which have proven environmental benefits. After all, using public money to accelerate technology uptake so as to achieve broader societal goals or public goods is an established approach in many other sectors of society – why not try more of this in agriculture in the quest to reap the full agronomic and environmental benefits of digital farming?

Smart farming has already developed in some EU countries, especially in Northern Europe, while some others are still lagging behind. Don’t you fear that the introduction of new technologies in the farming sector will eventually create a two-speed agriculture?

We definitely need to avoid the risk of a digital divide in EU agriculture. From a farm machinery point of view, we believe this can be done. The key concept here is partial digitisation. Partial digitisation can be a sensible and achievable step for any farmer wanting to advance on the path of digital farming. For instance, even a farmer with old analogue machines can partially digitise them by adding relatively inexpensive digital support tools to them such as, for instance, so-called Bluetooth beacons.

If installed on a tractor or combine harvester they allow the vehicle to be clearly identified. Any vehicle, whatever its age, manufacturers or purpose, can be fitted with such beacons which, in turn, can be connected to smartphones and thus be embedded in modern cloud-based farm management software systems.

Farming machinery sales dropped in 2016 and there is a similar projection for 2017. What are the main reasons behind that and what do you plan to do to reverse this trend?

The ability of farmers to invest in new machines greatly depends on farm income levels which, in turn, depend on the current prices for milk, wheat and other agricultural raw materials. Like our customers, we are happy to see that prices, for instance, in the milk sector, have recently recovered again. As an industry serving the farming sector, we need to be acutely aware of these trends on the demand side and react to them, yet it is not up to us to shape or, let alone, reverse them.

Another far more immediate and worrying trend for our industry are the regulatory compliance costs for farm machines in the EU which have risen sharply in recent years. One fundamental problem with much of EU regulation of farm machines has been that it has been directly based on EU legislation for the cars industry and was simply extended to us. However, the farm machinery and automotive industries are not comparable at all.

In fact, in terms of their size, structural set-up, commercial realities, and end-use of the final products, they follow entirely different trends. As such, we need far more tailor-made EU industrial policies for the farm machinery sector if we really want to boost the industry’s innovative power and competitiveness on the supply-side.