ORGANE took part in the EIP-AGRI Focus Group on "Digital Tools for Nutrient Management" and has contributed to the Final Report, including to a mini-paper concerning "Creating trusted nutrient management tools through better data sharing", which is an annex to the Final Report. It has for Henning Lyngsø Foged been rewarding to participate in the Focus Group, meeting a variety of stakeholdes that represents different perspectives of tools for nutrient management, as well as differnet backgrounds, experiences and geographical areas of the EU. The discussions in the Focus Group has clearly justified the Focus Group and its role in reaching a more joint underdstanding of the subject as a basis for directing the European Commission in its implementaiton of the Farm-to-Fork startegy. The relevance of the subject is underlined by the policy goals of the Farm-to-Fork startegy of the current Common Agricultural Policy, among other targeting a 20% reduction of fertiliser use by 2030.

Among goals for ORGANE's participation in the Focus Group was to emphasize on the importance of an increased use of data sharing, especially promoting that Member States enable crop producers to access their own data in public registers via the digital tools for nutrient management, so that crop producers immediately can benefit from using the tools, whereas the current situation is that they have to register a wealth of information which they aready reported to the authorities before they can get some useful calculations and information from the tools. Likewise, ORGANE has highlighted farmers unwillingness to use tools that are developed and maintained by public authorites, and their fear that the interests of public authories are different from their own crop production business interests. Crop producers will not accept public authorities' access to their crop production management data, but wish to be in full control of data that are shared with public authorities. Therefore, ORGANE is much behind the statements in the summary of the Final Report saying: "Moreover, farmers will not adopt tools that need manual input of data that could be easily imported automatically. And, most importantly, farmers want to stay in full control of their data."

ORGANE has just released an updated version of its offered digital tool for nutrient management, namely CropManager - https://www.cropmanager.eu. The particiation in the Focus Group has been a great inspiration for the updating/development of CropManager.

Please find the Final Report from the EIP-AGRI Focus Group on "Digital tools for sustainable nutrient management" here.