Abstract

Farmers are burdened by the need to deliver various items of information about their farms for several purposes, both administrative and commercial. Once a piece of data is stored in some location it is worthwhile utilizing it in all instances where the data is required. Farm management software contains a lot of information about farm activities. Use of plant protection products (PPP) is one of the crop production operations that users of management software commonly record there.

So far, Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) has used a web survey supplemented with a telephone interview to collect PPP use data from farms in Finland. In the next data collection, electronic data from farm management software is going to be used as a new option for the farmer to declare the required data on PPP use for the year 2026. Electronic PPP data is also assumed by Eurostat to be the principal data source in the future collection of PPP data.

For the farmer, use of farm management software data is a more convenient way to declare the required PPP data than web survey or telephone interview. Because there are many farms that don’t use farm management software, online survey and telephone interview will still be provided as means to respond to the survey.

The use of PPP data from farm management software will be arranged so that farmers will have the option to authorize their farm management software provider to transfer their PPP use data to Luke. While authorizing the use of PPP data from the software, the farmer also assures that the data is correct. For the farmers it will be important that they are aware of how their data is used and that they have control and trust over the use.

An application programming interface (API) will be constructed to enable the transfer of the PPP data from farm management software for the production of PPP use statistics for the year 2026.

Software companies have been motivated to co-operate, because the PPP data transfer from the software will be a useful functionality for their customers. The companies already have experience in this kind of co-operation, for example in connecting their farm management software with web services of farm subsidies administration. Experience gained in the use of PPP data from farm management software will help to expand the use of software data to other topics, such as fertilization.