A Service for Improving the Assignments of Common Agriculture Policy Funds to Farmers and Land Owners

1. CAPAS
A Service for Improving the Assignments of
Common Agriculture Policy Funds to Farmers and
Land Owners
1Mariano Navarro, 1Ramón Baiget, 1Jesús Estrada, and 2Dumitru Roman
1TRAGSA Group, Spain and 2SINTEF, Norway
dumitru.roman@sintef.no
@RuleML 2015

2. TRAGSA Group
http://www.tragsa.es
• A Spanish public sector
administration company
• ~ 4000 people (Tragsatec)
• Provision of agricultural, forestry,
livestock, and rural development
services, to the conservation and
protection of the environment
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3. For the last 50 years the Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been the
European Union's (EU) most
important common policy. This
explains why traditionally it has taken
a large part of the EU's budget […]
REGULATION (EU) No 1306/2013 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 17 December 2013
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4. • Stakeholders:
• Public administration (e.g. FEGA in
Spain)
• Farmers and land owners
• Intermediaries (e.g. service providers)
• Problems:
• Unfair grant assignment and
expenditure on audits
• Incorrect grant assignments
• Farmers could loose close to 30% of funding
CAP funds assignments
4

5. CAPAS funds assignment service
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6. Technological Challenges
• Datasets:
• Volume
• Heterogeneity
• Different sectors and
sources
• Technical process:
• Dynamic
• Integration
05.08.2015 proDataMarket 6
Free Maps Layers
WMS, WFS - Inspire
Lidar
Integration of
data from different
sources and scales
Dynamic process
Agricultural parcels
+
Cadastre / Land
registry
Land Cover – Land Use
INSPIRE – EU 2020

7. Example technical challenges: working with
LIDAR data
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• LIDAR Dataset
• Points cloud
• Relief
• Elevation profile
• Vegetation and crops type
LiDAR
CLASSES
Vegetation
Soil

8. Variables to be used in funds assignment rules
• Soil characterization
• Vegetation cover
• Crop diversification
• Type, density and surface of Ecological Focus Areas
• Proximity or overlapping to:
• Sites of Community Interest (SICs)
• Natural Parks and Protected Sites
• Special Bird Protection Area
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9. New CAP funds assignment rules
• Crop Diversification: e.g. “A farmer must cultivate at least 2 crops when his
arable land exceeds 10 hectares and at least 3 crops when his arable land
exceeds 30 hectares. The main crop may cover at most 75% of arable land,
and the two main crops at most 95% of the arable area.”
• Kind, density and surface of Ecological Focus Areas: e.g., Maintaining an
“ecological focus area” of at least 5% of the arable area of the holding for
farms with an area larger than 15 hectares (excluding permanent
grassland) – i.e. field margins, hedges, trees, fallow land, landscape
features, biotopes, buffer strips, afforested area. This figure will rise to
7% after a Commission report in 2017 and a legislative proposal.
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10. New CAP funds assignment rules (cont’)
• Ecological focus areas (EFA) on farms (determined by each member
country within the categories established by the EU)
• Are there EFAs in a specific parcel? How large are they? What is the surface ratio
between arable lands and EFAs surfaces?
• Conditionality - Obligations related to:
• Public Health: Use of authorized pesticides, Avoiding pollution, Appropriate products
storing…
• Environment: Avoiding groundwater pollution, Preservation of wild animals and
birds, Avoiding plastics pollution, Sewage sludge (they can be used only during a
specific period before grazing)…
• Satisfactory Conditions-Good practices: Avoiding erosion, Avoiding water wasting,
Avoiding spontaneous vegetation invasion…
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11. Some characteristics of the rules
• Complexity
• Direct translation from legal and administrative language
• Correct interpretation of the rules
• Potentially large number of rules
• Specification
• Indirectly, by European Commission or National Administrations
(Transposition), and refined by other stakeholders
• Frequency of change
• Not less than a year; typically 4-5 years
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12. Preliminary result: CAPAS service
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Currently integrated data:
• Permanent pasture
• Landscape elements
• Crop protection products and
pollution produced by them
http://sigpac.mapa.es/fega/visor/

13. Importance
• Exploitation of cross-sectorial data sources
• Publication and use of currently collected but unused datasets in the
distribution of funds algorithm
• New data processing algorithms over LIDAR Big Data
• Cadastre and ownership information enriched with biodiversity
information
• Implementation of European 2020 CAP funds assignment rules
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14. Impacts and outcomes
• Sharing of TRAGSA internal property datasets in novel ways
• Exploitation of cadastral data and other cross-sectorial data
• Sharing the GIS descriptive data obtained from LIDAR in novel ways
• Internationalization process
• Fairer funds assignment
• Public costs saving
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15. Thank you!
Contact: dumitru.roman@sintef.no; jmev@tragsa.es
http://prodatamarket.eu
http://www.smartopendata.eu
http://www.tragsa.es
@prodatamarket
@smartopendata