Data sharing between cooperatives sparks green transition
Danish agriculture has a long history of innovation. Now, two of the largest agricultural companies have joined forces with a smaller startup company to create optimisation data for farmers, which will help to strengthen the green transition in agriculture and achieve further integrator benefits in the Danish cooperative model.
Danish agriculture must halve its climate footprint in 2030 and be climate-neutral in 2050. This requires large investments, innovation and not least cooperation across the value chain. Therefore, two of Denmark’s largest agricultural companies have now joined forces with the tech company IQinAbox to create a solution that gives the joint owners measurable results on key production key figures that will increase sustainability.
A sustainable solution
The slaughterhouse company Danish Crown and the agricultural company DLG have joined forces to present its co-operative members who supply pigs to Danish Crown’s slaughterhouses with dynamic data on their pigs’ daily growth and feed efficiency.
In concrete terms, this means that co-operative members can see how their pigs grow and how feed efficiency develops every time they deliver pigs for slaughter. This is important as feed efficiency is the factor that has the greatest impact on both the climate efficiency and economy of the pig producer.
At Danish Crown, we have gone from providing static slaughter data to our members to presenting them with dynamic key figures that they can use to a greater extent to optimise their production. The dynamic information is used in Danish Crown for internal optimisation of production and sales, but the new opportunities also allow our members to make decisions much faster than before. For example, through closer monitoring of whether their pigs grow worse or their feed efficiency deteriorates, and it creates results for both the production economy and the sustainability accounts on the farm,” says Nicolaj Nørgaard, Director of Ownership at Danish Crown.
Director of Animal Nutrition at DLG, Troels Møller Olesen, is pleased that the two cooperatives can jointly increase the owners’ productivity through the collaboration.
“It is important to us that customers can continuously gain insight into the effect of the purchased feed on production and productivity, without having to make more registrations than they do today. As a cooperative, we are, among other things, set in the world to “create and develop tools that provide value for our owners and customers. With this solution, we provide valuable data that agriculture can use in the daily work on the farms,” says Troels Møller Olesen and continues:
“By collaborating across the value chain on data sharing, we create a valuable tool that can deliver on two important agendas for the farmer – good production economy and climate efficiency. In the slightly longer term, we believe that with data from this initiative we can strengthen “our product development within feeding pigs in growth, just as we will probably be able to predict when the silo will run dry. With that knowledge, we can further make everyday life easier for our customers,” says Troels Møller Olesen.
An increased overview
The project has been developed together with the company IQinAbox, which has been responsible for model development and the technical platform, and Thomas Nejsum, who is director and co-owner, is pleased that the amount of usable data will be greater.
“IQinAbox was created to increase the amount of data that Danish farmers can use to make their decisions. Here, the collaboration with both Danish Crown and DLG has meant that we with the farmers’ permission have been able to link data that has otherwise lived in two ecosystems and thereby create a key figure for the farmer, which provides very concrete value, “says Thomas Nejsum.
The increased overview of the co-operative members’ feed efficiency week by week creates optimisation opportunities both for the individual producer, but also for the companies, where the overall overview helps to validate the sustainability goals.
“In Danish Crown, we started climate certification for our members in 2018, and here feed efficiency was one of the key figures. With the new function, we get a better and more dynamic overview of the development in feed efficiency in the owners’ pigs, and that helps to validate our sustainability goals, because we can always see if the feed efficiency will be better, and the climate footprint will thus be smaller, “says Nicolaj Nørgaard.
Source: DLG (in Danish)