Supporting the YEN Family through Covid-19 and beyond with an enhanced digital environment: Enhancing agricultural productivity, sustainability & profitability

UK Agriculture and the food system face challenges and opportunities from Covid-19 and Brexit, as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. UK farming faces change; in coming years farmers must farm in a different climate, with net-zero emissions, with reducing and redirected subsidy payments, with possible post-Brexit trade tariffs, producing healthier foods, reliably, with raised soil health, protecting threatened species and the qualities of air and water, whilst remaining commercially viable. The blueprints to achieve this do not currently exist, and can only be developed by working together. Productivity in UK agriculture lags well behind our international competitors, in part due to our fragmented knowledge & innovation system and relative lack of collaboration and sharing of knowledge and data. Arable agriculture has been very poor at systematically monitoring its inputs, processes and outputs (eg yield), so despite huge variability with and between fields and farms there is limited understanding of 'what works' in improving performance. On top of this Covid-19 has disrupted the normal knowledge exchange mechanisms through the numerous events & meetings that would normally occur.

Since 2012 ADAS has pioneered new approaches to knowledge generation and exchange in agriculture through its 'Agronomics' and 'Yield Enhancement Networks (YEN)', working collaboratively to collect and share ideas and data, learning together. The YEN has been very successful in engaging farmers, advisors, industry and researchers to come together around a shared conceptual framework, make measurements of the things that matter, share their data, ideas and experience, derive insights and test decisions. A core principal is the sharing of relevant data to allow comparisons of performance against peers through benchmarking reports; this provides the incentive for growers to share their data, enabling insights to be drawn from analysis of the full dataset.

The YEN now engages with over 300 farms in the UK, plus more across Europe and in Canada, and has expanded to cover seven crops, with new initiatives continually being added. However, funding for the YENs has been piecemeal and limited, relying entirely on industry sponsorship, so there has so far been no large-scale investment in the digital infrastructure needed to properly support the data exchange, visualisations, reporting, and analysis, that would really enhance the experience for YEN users, and would make the YEN concept really scalable to a much broader audience at low cost, tackling any number of issues, not just yield, and enabling new business models for profitable and sustainable expansion of the YENs to be developed.

We propose here development of 'Dynamic Benchmarking' to enable growers to easily compare the performance of their systems against similar systems of their choosing. This functionality will be available to all YENs. We will develop YEN-Zero as a new YEN with a far broader remit, available to all growers to calculate and compare greenhouse gas (GHG) intensities of their crops across all their fields. This will drive the collation of a large shared data resource from which ADAS and the community will derive insights and future revenues, from UK and beyond.