ENCOURAGING FOOD TRACEABILITY

Ensuring the traceability of food from field to fork has a great many benefits – particularly for consumers, who get to know where their food comes from, but also for farmers, who can use it to create a closer connection with their end customers. Now possible through the use of digital applications, traceability enables farmers to manage their farms more efficiently.

The AGRO-TECH software provided by the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture since 2000 is used by farmers to fulfil their legal agricultural traceability obligations. The app, available for smartphone and tablet, is a comprehensive management tool that is used to enter all sorts of useful data. Each module interacts with the other relevant mo-dules, preventing farmers from having to enter the same data more than once and saving them time.

Barto (Canton of Bern) has developed a digital farm solution that simplifies management, scheduling and reporting tasks for farmers. In addition, Agridea offers a broad range of software packages tailored to the requirements of all the different farming systems and sectors in Swiss agriculture (see page 83).

Xfarm (Canton of Ticino) is a platform developed by farmers for farmers to help them join the digital farming trend. This app simplifies farm data collection and analysis, reduces paperwork and ensures that agricultural products are traceable. It uses a combination of management software and sensors deployed on the farmer’s land. The platform also features modules for financial management, crop and fertilisation planning, production line traceability, disease alerts, irrigation advice and farming weather forecasts (see page 93). On an international level, two companies have joined forces to launch a large-scale pilot project. Swiss biotech multinational Lonza and start-up Authena (Canton of Zug) are working together to combat the use of counterfeit agrochemicals, which is very widespread in South America (20% of products sold) and Europe (10%). These counterfeit products are dangerous to human health, the environment and the crops themselves. The two companies have developed what is set to be one of the first blockchain-based digital technologies in the industry. This will provide not only proof of the authenticity of the chemical products being sold, but also full traceability and transparency throughout the value chain.