Farm Data Exchange (FDE)

Tackling the challenges and exploring opportunities around sharing and using agri-food and environmental data across the wider agriculture industry.

We began investigating this in early 2024 and it became clear there were the two key challenges for farmers and processors:

1. Requests for farming data are inconsistent and uncoordinated – often with different supply chains asking for similar information, but in slightly different formats or processed through different carbon calculators.
2. Demands on farmers to provide farming activity data are rapidly increasing – from retailers, processors, or even banks.

We started discussing what a solution could look like, engaging with dozens of key industry organisations and stakeholders.

From these discussions came a solution – Farm Data Exchange (FDE) – which would support the transfer of data from various sources under the control of the farmer.

For FDE to work it must be:

• Easy to use
• Trusted by farmers
• Have clear data ownership
• Capture the value of the data

It must be backed by:

• Farmers and growers
• Governments
• Supply chain and retailers

And it should be formed through industry collaboration, supported by governments.

AHDB’s board agreed a small proof-of-concept (PoC) proposal in January 2025 to see if an FDE solution can be developed.

That project is now underway and a delivery partner has been recruited.

The PoC will look to demonstrate the viability of a ‘decentralised data model’ for sharing farming activity data required to complete a carbon calculation.

A 'decentralised data model' means farming data remains in the separate systems and FDE enables them to speak to one another, with the farmer controlling the sharing of that data.

Farmers haven’t always trusted data-sharing systems, which has held back some past solutions. To fix this, we want to make sure farmers have control from the very beginning. This idea also matches what has worked well in other successful EU systems.

As well as proving the architecture and principles of FDE, the PoC looks to demonstrate three key aims:

1. Access farm activity data from existing data sources (e.g. BCMS, processors).
2. Provide permissions functionality to demonstrate farmer-control of data-sharing
3. Produce an output which can be passed into a commercial carbon (once permissioned for that purpose).