Farm Management Information Systems for Agricultural Statistics
Conference
10th International Conference on Agricultural Statistics
Format: CPS Paper - ICAS 2026
Keywords: crop yield, farm management information system, innovative data collection, lower response burden, plant protection
Abstract
New data requirements in EU regulations (2023/1538) demand more, more detailed, and more timely data from farmers. If at all possible, the use of traditional survey methods to acquire these new data from farmers will lead to an increasing response burden, which in turn may lead to a higher non-response. Connecting to Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) could provide a good alternative to traditional survey methods for National Statistical Institutes (NSI). Many farmers use FMIS to manage their farms, which they also use to comply to government regulations, and reports to other stakeholders. FMIS are therefore a high-quality data source, that can be accessed (semi-)automatically, largely reducing the response burden on the farmer. Market research of FMIS vendors has shown that most FMIS contain the required data for Statistics on agricultural inputs and output (SAIO) requirements such as the Crop Yield Statistics and the Plant Protection Statistics.
The advantages of using FMIS as a data source to meet SAIO requirements has led to the collaboration of three NSIs, CBS (The Netherlands), SSP (France) and Destatis (Germany). CBS, SSP and Destatis are at a different maturity level with experimenting, integrating and analysing FMIS data, and we are learning a lot from each other. In our presentation we hope to give you an idea of what is the best feasible way to integrate the NSIs and FMIS vendors on a local and European scale. In addition, we face similar issues, like the lack of trust of the farmer and farmer’s associations and unions in governmental organisations. We hope that our experiences will help other institutions to better involve the farmers on how to improve data collection and to make it easier and more efficient for the farmer. Lastly, we will present the possible FMIS data sharing solutions (such as an API or reporting system), the advantages and disadvantages of each data sharing solution and the results of the solutions that have already been piloted. So far, the results are promising.