Spatial IACS Data Supply of Farms in Catalonia

Countries

Spain

Policy areas

Organisation name General Directorate of Rural Development - Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food

Contact person: Oriol Anson Fradera

dg02.daam@gencat.cat

The management of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) grants generates a very high volume of data every year. The declarations include alphanumeric and geospatial information of farms, such as parcels, crops, hectares, irrigation systems and work units. Around 50 000 farmers make their declarations every year and these are submitted for administrative checks and about 5% are submitted for spot checks. Because of these controls (administrative and on-the-spot) the farmers’ declarations and the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) are always kept updated. There is no other system with such a short renewal cycle, so significant investment in updating cartography and all this updated and reliable data has a great value for other actors, beyond the manager of the grants.

The objective of the ‘Spatial IACS data supply of farms in Catalonia’ project is to help farmers improve their declarations. This makes them more reliable and accurate, preventing graphic overlaps between farmers and supplying open data for the agrarian sector, citizens and administrations. For this reason, three tools have been developed: the individual information of each holding (Cromos), the claim year declaration layer and the declared crops map.

The processing of community grants is submitted to a rigid and extensive procedure, which is regularly audited. This control and the audit system have been permanent since its beginning in 1992, and is achieved independently from political and economic circumstances. The system mainly uses a geographic base that reflects the reality of the landscape (LPIS) in which the grants are applied. The LPIS is renewed annually following the declarations of the farmers and the controls and updates of public organisations that manage it.

This organisation brought a well-structured and robust database that makes it possible to have the information updated and to make extractions of data in a quick and simple way. Geo-tagged data can be shared through putting them at the disposal of other units of the Department of Agriculture and other departments as well.

The implanted tools act in a synergetic way to maintain the Integrated System of Management and Control with updated information. These tools can be used in the 17 Spanish paying agencies and in any other country of the European Union.

The work scheme developed by the project can be adapted to other units of the Agriculture Department and to other departments, especially those with operations within the territory that require information from citizens or from companies. This involves collecting geo-tagged data and sharing them publicly to study them, compare them with data from other sectors and find correlations.

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