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Introduction (AgriFood)

Data Spaces for the Agrifood Industry​

The agrifood sector generates massive volumes of data from multiple sources —soil, climate, IoT sensors, machinery, satellite imagery, livestock management, traceability and certification— distributed across a wide range of heterogeneous actors.
An agrifood data space enables these datasets to be integrated, shared and processed in a federated, secure and auditable environment, ensuring full data sovereignty, semantic interoperability, transparent governance and trusted monetization mechanisms.

How an Agrifood Data Space Benefits the Sector​

Interoperability across the entire ecosystem

Standardised data exchange between farms, cooperatives, input suppliers, digital platforms, laboratories, certifiers and public administrations, eliminating silos and incompatible formats.

Privacy-preserving analytics with Compute-to-Data and secure Data Rooms

Algorithms move to the data—rather than data being transferred—through Compute-to-Data, enabling advanced analytics without exposing sensitive information.
Data Rooms provide secure, isolated and auditable environments where data remains fully under the owner’s control even during computation. They are essential for highly sensitive domains such as soil indicators, livestock health, financial records or commercial information.

Flexible and verifiable business models

Usage policies, smart contracts, pay-per-execution, subscription models and incentive mechanisms for data contribution.
All transactions are recorded in a distributed ledger, enabling transparent accounting, traceability and end-to-end auditability.

Governance and granular control by design

Web3 verifiable identities, revocable permissions, traceable access logs and automated compliance checks allow precise control over who accesses which data, under what conditions and for which purposes.

Why Now: Market Readiness and Technological Maturity​

European standardisation and certification (Gaia-X)

The Gaia-X Trust Framework, IDS connectors and Verifiable Credentials reduce technical friction and provide institutional-grade trust for cross-stakeholder data sharing.

Decentralised markets and secure computation (Ocean Enterprise Collective)

The Ocean Enterprise Collective provides interoperable Compute-to-Data, verifiable Data Rooms and automated monetization mechanisms without moving or replicating data.
Each dataset can be published with explicit policies and fine-grained control over which algorithms may run against it.

Open ontologies and sector-specific data models

Standards such as SAREF, Smart Data Models, and other FAIR-aligned vocabularies enable common semantics across IoT devices, farm machinery, earth observation and farm management systems.

Growing regulatory demand for transparency and auditability

Environmental reporting, eco-scheme compliance, supply chain traceability and carbon accounting increasingly require infrastructures capable of verifying data provenance, transformations and access rights end-to-end.

Evidence from real-world deployments

The initial deployment in the Azores Islands (Portugal) demonstrates the effectiveness of the model with:

  • parcel-level soil analysis,
  • Web3 verifiable identities for farmers,
  • secure Data Rooms for sensitive data processing,
  • fine-grained, policy-based access control,
  • and analytics executed without data movement using Compute-to-Data.