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

英国农业和食品体系面临着来自新冠肺炎和英国退欧的挑战和机遇，以及气候变化的缓解和适应。英国农业面临变化；未来几年，农民必须在不同的气候中耕种，实现净零排放，减少和调整补贴支付，可能在英国退欧后征收贸易关税，可靠地生产更健康的食品，提高土壤健康，保护受威胁的物种以及空气和水的质量，同时保持商业上的可行性。实现这一目标的蓝图目前还不存在，只能通过共同努力来制定。英国农业的生产率远远落后于我们的国际竞争对手，部分原因是我们的知识和创新体系支离破碎，以及相对缺乏合作和知识和数据共享。可耕种农业在系统监测其投入、过程和产出(如产量)方面一直很差，因此，尽管农田和农场之间以及田间和农田之间存在巨大差异，但人们对提高绩效的“有效方法”的了解有限。最重要的是，新冠肺炎通过通常会发生的无数活动和会议扰乱了正常的知识交流机制。自2012年以来，美国农业发展协会通过其“农学”和“产量提高网络”，开创了农业知识产生和交流的新途径，相互协作，收集和分享想法和数据，共同学习。日元非常成功地让农民、顾问、行业和研究人员聚集在一个共享的概念框架周围，对重要的事情进行衡量，分享他们的数据、想法和经验，得出见解并测试决策。一个核心原则是共享相关数据，以便通过基准报告与同行进行业绩比较；这为种植者提供了分享数据的动机，使人们能够从对整个数据集的分析中获得见解。Yen目前与英国的300多个农场以及欧洲和加拿大的更多农场接洽，并已扩大到覆盖7种作物，并不断增加新的举措。然而，对日元的资金一直是零碎和有限的，完全依赖于行业赞助，所以到目前为止，还没有在数字基础设施上进行大规模投资，以适当地支持数据交换、可视化、报告和分析，这将真正增强日元用户的体验，并使日元概念真正能够以低成本扩展到更广泛的受众，解决任何问题，而不仅仅是产量，并使日元能够开发出盈利和可持续扩张的新商业模式。我们建议在这里开发“动态基准”，使种植者能够轻松地将他们系统的性能与他们选择的类似系统进行比较。这一功能将对所有日本人开放。我们将开发Yen-Zero作为一种范围更广的新Yen-Zero，供所有种植者计算和比较他们所有农田中作物的温室气体(GHG)强度。这将推动对大型共享数据资源的整理，ADAS和社区将从这些资源中获得洞察力和来自英国及其他地区的未来收入。

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.