Ministry of Agriculture creates a single digital platform for agriculture

2022: Creating a single digital platform for agriculture

At the end of October 2022, the Ministry of Agriculture announced the creation of a single digital platform for agriculture. According to Maxim Zakharov, deputy director of the Department for Digital Development and Management of State Information Resources of the Agro-Industrial Complex of the Department, the new decision will unite all information systems of the ministry.

As Maxim Zakharov emphasized, this step should be an example for an industry where each enterprise, at least a large one, "invents the wheel." This, in his opinion, is not yet very critical, given the general low level of digitalization in the industry. Enterprises will reach the emergence of standards, but not immediately, and they must be pushed, including setting an example.

Ministry of Agriculture creates a single digital platform

Obviously, digitalization is designed primarily to improve production efficiency. The starting point for this is the presence of reliable industry data, - said the head of the Ministry of Agriculture Dmitry Patrusheva, speaking at a strategic session on artificial intelligence, held together with Sberbank, in May 2022.

According to Patrushev, the collection and processing of industry information, including using big data, will be carried out within the framework of the Single Window information system. It was planned to put it into commercial operation by the end of 2022.

The Ministry of Agriculture believes that the digitalization of the agro-industrial complex also contributes to improving the quality and safety of products. By October 2022, the Mercury system is operating in the country, which provides a unified information environment for veterinary medicine, and increases the level of biological and food safety of products.

According to Patrushev, in the strategic perspective, the Ministry of Agriculture plans to create a unique digital ecosystem around agriculture, combining multi-level information systems for managing the agro-industrial complex, related industries and departments.^[1]

2020: Development of the concept of the national platform "Digital Agriculture"

"LANIT-Integration" developed the concept of the national platform "Digital Agriculture." This was announced in "Lanit" on February 12, 2020.

The platform is created in accordance with the departmental project of the Ministry of Agriculture of the same name - "Digital Agriculture." At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture itself is also responsible for the development of the platform core. The competition for the development of the concept, as follows from the information of the tender of the Ministry of Agriculture on the official website of public procurement, the ministry held from September to October 2019.https ^[2] The cost of creating the concept was 50 million rubles. However, the ministry signed a contract with Lanit for more than half the amount - 22.9 million rubles.

The second place according to the results of the tender for the creation of the concept was taken by Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov. In addition to him, three more organizations also participated in the competition - the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, the Scientific and Industrial Company High Technologies and Strategic Systems, and Management Systems.

The period at which Lanit was supposed to develop the concept, according to the tender, was from October 25 to December 31, 2019.

It was not possible to get acquainted with the text of the TAdviser concept, since the Ministry of Agriculture and Lanita did not provide the document to the publication, without explaining what this is connected with and when the document will appear in the public domain.

The platform will include more than 50 services necessary to manage the industry, Lanit said.

According to Lanit representatives, the concept assumes that the platform will include six subsets providing for the digitalization of the following areas of agriculture:

• land use and land management;
• product traceability;
• agrometheoprognosis;
• collecting industry data;
• information support and provision of services;
• storage and distribution of information materials.

Referring to the text of the concept, Pavel Svarnik, executive director of the LANIT-Integration Center for Strategic Development and Digital Transformation, told TAdviser that the platform needs to be created in 2020-2024.

It is planned to develop the platform by stages, during which individual sub-platform services will be designed, developed and put into operation. The creation of groups of services and subsforms is supposed to be within the framework of the implementation of 11 trunk initiatives, - Pavel Svarnik told TAdviser.

He did not provide information to TAdviser about what exactly these backbone initiatives will be.

The composition of the activities, as well as specific requirements for their results, will be determined by the customer separately in each specific case, but taking into account the platform concept, - Pavel Svarnik informed TAdviser.

The platform, as told in "Lanit," will include more than 50 services necessary to manage the industry. As examples of platform services, Pavel Svarnik cited TAdviser two of them - the decisive task of multifactorial monitoring and modeling of the development of crop diseases and performing the function of agrometheoprognosis.

Platform services, as noted in Lanit, will be public and private. The latter means those that will fall under the control of non-governmental organizations. In this case, the operator, according to Pavel Svarnik, providing the industry with demanded services, will provide a certain level of service quality.

Only services that are aimed at solving state tasks for accounting, control and regulation in the industry will be financed from the federal budget. Whether public funding will receive those that will be managed by non-governmental organizations, he did not tell TAdviser, noting that the platform's funding and management formats have yet to be formed. Also, according to Svarnik, in the case of the platform, not its total cost will be calculated, but the price of creating individual subsets and services will be determined.

Speaking about the large number of platform services, Pavel Svarnik told TAdviser that sub-platforms will have a different number of services of varying complexity, and one of them will have "only one service."

The platform services will be aimed, first of all, at satisfying the current requests of representatives of different segments of agriculture, so there will be so many of them, - said Pavel Svarnik.

First of all, the platform services will become useful for agricultural producers, we are sure of Lanit. In particular, they will allow operators to provide services throughout Russia. At the same time, Pavel Svarnik explained to TAdviser that the platform service, which, due to the services provided, is geographically related - for example, the brigade's departure to the field - cannot be implemented simultaneously by one supplier throughout the country.

But services related to data processing and analysis will be able to be provided remotely for users in different regions. As an example here, an analysis of the type of agricultural culture disease, carried out on the basis of photography data, can be made, - Pavel Svarnik informed TAdviser.

One of the ministry's requirements for creating a concept, as Alexander Arkhipov, director of the department for digital development and management of state information resources of the agro-industrial complex of the Ministry of Agriculture, told TAdviser, was the document's accounting of data as one of the key assets of the industry and its orientation towards the application of modern principles of their collection and processing.

This approach will allow us to quickly move forward in the implementation of the measures of the concept, - explained Alexander Arkhipov.

Interaction of participants in the agro-industrial complex in electronic form, which implies the platform, according to Lanit's calculations, will lay the foundations for new approaches to farming. For example, precision farming and forecasting crop yields. In turn, the data aggregated by the platform will be able to increase the transparency and predictability of processes for market participants, as well as reduce the risks of financial institutions implementing the issuance of funds for targeted industry programs.

The introduction of the platform will allow the state to reach a new level of industry control, to obtain a more flexible management system based on complete reliable and up-to-date data, "said Murat Marshankulov, Managing Director of LANIT-Integration.

At the same time, the information collected by the platform services, in his opinion, will be in demand by organizations of related industries: suppliers of means of production and material resources, banks and insurance companies, buyers of agricultural products, logistics companies. Moreover, Lanit is confident that the platform will become the basis for building a whole ecosystem of additional services and services for the agro-industrial complex.

2018: Development of the departmental project "Digital Agriculture"

The Ministry of Agriculture has developed a departmental project "Digital Agriculture," which is planned to be fully implemented in the period from 2019 to 2024. This was stated by State Secretary - Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation Ivan Lebedev on October 17, 2018 during an expanded meeting of the scientific and expert council of the State Duma Committee on Agrarian ^[3]

According to Ivan Lebedev, the project budget will be 304 billion rubles. Half of these funds are planned to be received from the state as an additional subsidy, the other 152 billion rubles - from extrabudgetary sources, namely, from the agricultural and IT-Business.

By digital agriculture, as follows from the text of the project available on the website of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry understands agriculture based on modern methods of producing agricultural products and food using digital technologies (Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence, big data analysis, e-commerce, etc.), ensuring an increase in labor productivity and reducing production costs.

The goal of the project is the digital transformation of agriculture through the introduction of digital technologies and platform solutions to ensure a technological breakthrough in the agro-industrial complex and achieve productivity growth in "digital" agricultural enterprises by 2 times by 2024.

The project provides for a set of measures to introduce digital technologies and platform solutions into the agro-industrial complex. Within the framework of it, the Ministry of Agriculture plans to create and develop a number of software products, namely:

• the Digital Agriculture National Digital Public Agricultural Management Platform;

This platform, as noted in the project, will be a digital platform integrated with digital sub-platforms. It will be designed to manage agriculture at the regional and municipal levels.

Among the goals of the platform is to provide the opportunity to identify and analyze point problems and conditions that constrain the development of digital technologies in the agro-industrial complex of the regions of Russia, as well as to determine the main and most promising digital technologies for the agricultural producer.

Another goal of the platform is to accumulate data from federal executive bodies on agricultural lands for their subsequent accounting, monitoring and analytics.

The project also states that the Digital Agriculture platform will allow building work and provide a system of access to information about the counterparty, which, in turn, will make it possible to quickly check enterprises when solving serious issues, such as financing organizations, as well as their lending and insurance. In addition, the platform will make it possible to remotely control the amount of product received, its quality, processing process, movement and others operations.

• module "Agricultural solutions";

This module will be a sub-platform of the national platform "Digital Agriculture," designed to improve the efficiency of agricultural producers. Among the tasks of the sub-platform, achieving the following indicators:

• increase in labor productivity at agricultural enterprises by 2 times per employee;

• reduction of enterprises "unit costs for business administration by 1.5 times;

• reduction of the share of material costs in the cost of a unit of agricultural products (fuel and lubricants, fertilizers, electricity, planting material, feed, etc.) by 20% or more.

The project also provides for the creation of an industry-wide electronic educational environment "Land of Knowledge" for distance learning of specialists from agricultural enterprises.

{{quote 'Collectively, these services will accumulate the entire array of information on production processes in the field of agriculture, from the smallest details of production to solutions to global issues of the entire agricultural sector. This will bring agriculture to a new level of development and will make a technological breakthrough in the agro-industrial complex, the project says.}}

In addition to creating software products, during the implementation of the project, the Ministry of Agriculture plans to train specialists from agricultural enterprises, forming their competencies in the field of digital economy.

See also

• IT in the agro-industrial complex of Russia
• IT in the agro-industrial complex in the world

Notes