Today's agrifood systems face enormous challenges. Digital technologies can contribute to solving many of these - but so far there has often been a lack of interoperability between various systems. They must seamlessly combinable in order to transport data and make the best possible use of it. Standards are an important tool to strengthen interoperability.

For this reason, a new Technical Committee (TC) was established at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in October 2023. The ISO/TC 347 proposed by DIN will develop norms and standards in order to support interoperable systems in data-driven agrifood systems.

Scope and international participation

The focus of ISO/TC 347 lies on standardization activities for holistic and principle-based optimization of decision-making. The emphasis is on challenges with regard to interoperability such as consistent agricultural semantics, standardized data formats in agrifood systems, data management of animal breeding and husbandry activities as well as the topic of urban farming. DIN is leading the secretariat and the US-American standardization organization (ANSI) provides the chairperson.

Participation at national level

To bring national interests to the international level in ISO/TC 347, DIN has set up a national mirror committee. Here, national stakeholders are organized to discuss their interests together, initiate national standardization projects and build consensus. The delegation for international work at ISO is decided within this national mirror committee.

On January 16, 2024, the founding meeting of the national mirror committee took place at DIN e.V. in Burggrafenstraße 6, 10787 Berlin, bringing together participants from various areas of society such as business, science and the public sector. The name "Data-supported agricultural and food systems" was jointly agreed upon and Dr. med. Christan Hennig was elected chairperson.
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Background

The establishment of ISO/TC 347 was one of the key structural recommendations of a temporary committee based at ISO, the ISO Strategy Advisory Group (SAG) Smart Farming. Under the joint leadership of ANSI and DIN, over 150 experts developed a Smart Farming standardization roadmap in 18 months of international collaboration. This roadmap provides technical and structural recommendations for standardization work to standardize data-driven agricultural and food systems.

As part of the work on the roadmap, the experts from over 20 countries analysed the standardization landscape along the entire food value chain and examined nine topic areas with regard to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These include crop production, livestock farming, urban agriculture, terminology and semantics, social aspects, supply chain, OEMs, climate adaptation, environment and data.

At the heart of the roadmap are comprehensive recommendations for new standardization projects along the entire value chain as well as structural recommendations for international cooperation in the sector. The focus here is on the development of standardized agricultural semantics and basic requirements for data-driven systems in the agrifood sector. The structural recommendations include the establishment of the new ISO/TC 347 as well as the foundation of an internal ISO coordination committee involving the 32 ISO/TCs relevant to the topic of smart farming (Smart Farming Coordination Committee). The implementation of an International Workshop Agreement (IWA) for the development of a data reference architecture as a pre-normative document was also recommended.