The agriculture and food (often referred to as "agrifood") industry has a profound influence on our climate: about a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be linked to food. This comes not only from direct agricultural production, but the entire food system: from land use to processing, transportation, packaging, and waste.
Although a lot of data is still recorded and transmitted on paper, the digitization of the agrifood sector is rapidly advancing with the adoption of precision agriculture, sophisticated sensor networks, and Farm Management Information Systems. Precise operational data can now be used to optimize efficiency, reduce resource usage, or increase soil health.
Unfortunately, this data exists in a myriad of non-interoperable formats, and shows a proliferation of different standards and interfaces. For example, satellite and drone map data provide insights used for variable-rate fertilizer application. This requires coordination between multiple systems, but leads to optimized resource use and environmental benefits. A lack of interoperability prevents optimal coordination between different systems, leading to suboptimal environmental and economic outcomes.
Enabling data sharing between systems could provide concrete economic, environmental, and societal benefits, not only for individual farmers, but across the entirety of the agrifood sector, including municipalities, governments, and other stakeholders.
Data spaces, such as the emerging Common European Agricultural Data Space (CEADS) aim to tackle the technical, governance, organizational, and legal issues that arise from increased data sharing between stakeholders. While researching data sharing in the agrifood sector and specifically data spaces, we identified a set of questions we hope can spark interesting and informative discussions:
- High-quality data is essential for deriving useful knowledge and insights. How can a system incentivize stakeholders to input data of high quality into a data space or even ensure it?
- If sharing data would result in a disadvantage or risk for the stakeholder, they will likely not engage in data sharing. What are the exact scenarios where multiple stakeholders can derive value from sharing data? Do they need to benefit equally? How could benefiting the commons (e.g., the environment) provide incentive?
- Regulations such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) have shown that while large corporations have resources to adapt quickly to system-level change, small-scale farmers are slower to adapt their processes even when their participation in the EU market is at stake. How can a diverse set of stakeholders, including small-scale farmers who represent the majority of producers in many countries, be included in the process of designing a data space that provides value to everyone? How can the barriers preventing farmers from participating in data sharing be addressed?
In our research into data spaces and an interview we conducted with a German farmer, one thing became clear: the privacy of the shared data and trust in the technology is of great importance. If farmers fear that sharing data could put them at a competitive disadvantage, they will not use the system.
At the SINE Foundation, we develop cryptographic tools, that use secure multi-party computation (MPC), to allow computation on data without disclosing or transferring it. In other words, the technology we develop enables multiple stakeholders to perform analysis on encrypted data. We believe that this technology can lead to data insights that would otherwise not be possible to obtain. To assess its applicability in the agrifood sector, we have prepared the following questions:
- One of the first examples of MPC being used in the real world is sugar beets contract trading in Denmark (2008). Though farmers could already trade contracts, they scarcely did until reduced EU subsidies created pressure to reallocate contracts in an economically optimal way. This was solved using a double auction where MPC was employed to protect the privacy of the bids. Could such an auction improve contract allocation for German sugar beet farmers and processors? Are there other agricultural products where such an auction would make sense?
- Given that agricultural yield depends on many factors, can we devise analysis on joint data that provides farmers with actionable insights? Why should farmers partake if the result of an analysis might distort the competition?
- How might watersheds optimize water allocation across farms by computing collective need and availability without revealing individual usage patterns or business strategies?
Are there other relevant and potentially more prominent challenges in the agriculture and food industry that require data collaboration across entities? Reach out to us with relevant problems and questions on LinkedIn or directly at reports@sine.foundation.
References
- M. Crippa, E. Solazzo, D. Guizzardi, F. Monforti-Ferrario, F. N. Tubiello and A. Leip, Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9
- AGRI DATASPACE, Building a European framework for the secure and trusted data space for agriculture (2024). https://agridataspace-csa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/AGRIDATA-SPACE-FINAL-BROCHURE.pdf
- GCP and SINE Foundation, EUDR Guidance and Recommendations (2024). https://www.globalcoffeeplatform.org/eudr-guidance-and-recommendations/
- G. Petroni and J. Hoppe, Proposed EU Deforestation Law Delay Brings Uncertainty to Commodities Players (2024). https://www.wsj.com/articles/proposed-eu-deforestation-law-delay-brings-uncertainty-to-commodities-players-3eac3982
- The Common EuropeanAgricultural Data Space, Trust in Data. Growth in Agriculture (2025). https://ceads.eu/
- G. Brunori, M. Bacco, C. Puerta-Piñero, M. T. Borzacchiello, M. T. Borzacchiello, E. Stormer, Agri-food data spaces: Highlighting the need for a farm-centered strategy (2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340925001209
- SINE Foundation, The Polytune MPC Engine (2025). https://polytune.org/
- P. Bogetoft, D. Lund Christensen, I. Damgård, M. Geisler, T. Jakobsen, M. Krøigaard, J. D. Nielsen, J. Buus Nielsen, K. Nielsen, J. Pagter, M. Schwartzbach and T. Toft, Secure Multiparty Computation Goes Live (2009). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-03549-4_20
Acknowledgements
- Thanks to Hagen Meyer for the interesting and insightful background discussion.