On the 24th of January, 2020, Wageningen University & Research will organise an innovation hub, the Nitrogen (‘Stikstof’) Scrum, with AgInfra+ contribution and use of a VRE in Apeldoorn.

The initiative for the Stikstof Scrum lies partially with the Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster). They are an important big data entity, that collects and registers a lot of relevant data with cross overs into agriculture. They play an important role when it comes to land redistribution processes. Kadaster wants to evaluate their current processes that include agricultural data, and familiarize themselves with new ag data sources, such as soil sensors and other IOT devices. What are short and long term effects of processes in terms of ecosystem services? What is the overall impact of land redistribution in a given area?

With respect to farmers and other stakeholders, Kadaster wants to better understand how they can serve them with high quality data and information? Is there are a role for Kadaster in supporting farmers to market their environmental performance? (circularity, Nitrogen Neutrality, CO2 footprint, etc). Selected teams of farmers, experts from Kadaster, Wageningen University and Research and FarmHack will work collaboratively in four tracks in scrum-like fashion in a Virtual Research Environment, to explore data and possible applications. Focus area is Olderberkoop (Friesland). The data offering is targeted on this area and the typical dairy farm therein. A Scrum Master guides teams through the program, which contains plenary parts, with quick pitches and mid-term demo’s for the exchange of ideas and sharing of knowledge. At the end of the day, results will be pitched to an expert committee (with representatives of LTO, LNV, WUR and Kadaster) to explore if and how results can be embedded in current or upcoming projects.

WUR offers a dedicated Virtual Research Environment (VRE), which is used for cloud-based collaborative data science. A VRE offers online access to required tools, such as notebooks for explorative data science, and to a computer cluster for processing algorithms at scale.

For the Nitrogen Scrum the VRE will contain (work in progress!):

• Open source models (grasland management, crop models, feed model)
• Open Data (Agro Data Cube contains Big Open Data on plot characteristics, meteo, satellites etc)
• Farm Management Data from a typical Dairy Farm
• Administrative and spatial data on property from the Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster)
• Sensor data: soil sensors, air & water quality sensors

For more information please read in Dutch here