=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1417/paper19
|storemode=property
|title=CAPAS: A Service for Improving the Assignments of Common Agriculture Policy Funds to Farmers and Land Owners
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1417/paper19.pdf
|volume=Vol-1417
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ruleml/NavarroBER15
}}
==CAPAS: A Service for Improving the Assignments of Common Agriculture Policy Funds to Farmers and Land Owners==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1417/paper19.pdf
CAPAS: A Service for Improving the Assignments of
Common Agriculture Policy Funds to
Farmers and Land Owners
Mariano Navarro1, Ramón Baiget1, Jesús Estrada1 and Dumitru Roman2
1 TRAGSA Group, Conde de Peñalver 84, 28006, Madrid, Spain
{mnc, rbl, jmev}@tragsa.es
2
SINTEF, Pb. 124 Blindern, 0314 Oslo, Norway
dumitru.roman@sintef.no
Abstract. The Tragsa Group is part of the group of companies administered by
the Spanish state-owned holding company Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones
Industriales (SEPI). Its 37 years of experience have placed this business group
at the forefront of different sectors ranging from agricultural, forestry, livestock,
and rural development services, to conservation and protection of the environ-
ment in Spain. Tragsa is currently developing a business case around the im-
plementation of a Common Agriculture Policy Assignment Service (CAPAS) –
an extension of a currently active and widely used service (more than 20 million
visits per year). The extension of the service in this business case is based on
leveraging new cross-sectorial data sources, and targets a substantial reduction
of incorrect agricultural funds assignments to farmers and land owners. This
paper provides an overview of the business case, technical challenges related to
the implementation of CAPAS (in areas such as data integration), discusses the
current solution and potential use of rule technologies.
Keywords: property data, data integration, “greening” economy, rules
1 Business Case
As an introduction for CAPAS business case, it is appropriate to quote from the Euro-
pean Commission Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funding web page:1
“For the last 50 years the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been the Euro-
pean Union's (EU) most important common policy. This explains why traditionally it
has taken a large part of the EU's budget, although the percentage has steadily de-
clined over recent years. […]
The European taxpayer rightly expects that these sums are correctly spent. It is
therefore of paramount importance that management and checking systems are in
place which give reasonable assurance that the sums are spent properly and that any
irregular payments are detected and recovered.”
1 http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/cap-funding/index_en.htm
Developing on that idea, the CAPAS business case extends and improves an exist-
ing service of CAP funds assignments, developed by Tragsa for the Spanish public
administration, farmers and land owners, with the purpose of achieving a better and
more objective assignment of funds. The current service2 is based on data provided by
various stakeholders and suffers from the following problems:
To public administration: Data submitted by rural banks or owners is often
incorrect or inaccurate. The result is an unfair grant assignment and expendi-
ture on audits.
To farmers and land owners: If their “kind of crop” or “Areas of Ecological
Interest (AEI) surface” specification is inaccurate, it will turn out in incorrect
grant assignments (close to 30%).
The current service is widely used in Spanish rural areas and has more than 20 mil-
lion visits per year. Typically, it is used directly by land owners and, more often, by
rural banks, rural labor unions or SMEs that hire their services to land owners. These
existing users will continue to be an important target group for the extended service.
The opportunities to internationalize the extended service powered by a better algo-
rithm based on new data sources are very clear due to the fact that it solves a common
challenge that is present in all similar Common Agricultural Policy funds assignment
services in Europe and beyond. It is important to note that there is a CAP funds as-
signment service in each Ministry of Agriculture of each European Member State.
Some examples include:
Austria: AgrarMarkt3
Belgium: Flanders - Agentschap Landbouw en Visserij74; Wallonia - Minis-
tère de la Région wallonne, Direction générale Agriculture4
Bulgaria: State Fund Agriculture - PA for the Bulgarian RDP5
Slovenia: Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Agricultural Markets and
Rural Development6
Spain: Fondo Español de Garantía Agraria (FEGA)7
Currently, the assignment of funds is based on several parameters provided by hu-
man operators, whose work is mainly concerned with ortophotos, satellite and aerial
images, and interested parties such as the land owners. For example, “pasture admis-
sibility” (a percentage defining if a specific parcel is suitable or not for grazing) or
“irrigation coefficient” (a percentage defining the irrigated surface ratio) are input
variables of a business rule that modifies the funds assigned to a given farmer or
company.
2 https://www.fega.es/PwfGcp/es/ayudas_dir_desa_rural/aplicacion_sigpac/index.jsp
3 http://www.ama.gv.at
4 http://www.vlaanderen.be/landbouw
5 http://www.dfz.bg
6 http://www.arsktrp.gov.si
7 http://www.fega.es/PwfGcp/es/
Fig. 1. An example
In the Figure 1 above, there are two highlighted/shaded parcels. For the upper-right
shaded parcel (in pink), the “pasture admissibility” value is equal to 100%, while for
the lower-left shaded parcel (in white), the “pasture admissibility” is equal to 0%.
Even at first sight, it becomes evident that soil type and tree distribution is quite simi-
lar. The origin of that difference is irrelevant: the mentioned parcels are very close,
but they could have been processed by different operators, or, maybe one of the own-
ers could have requested a modification for the defined values. This case shows a
good example of a situation that results in incorrect funds assignments and would
need to be investigated/fixed by subsequent audits.
Furthermore, not all input variables that define funds assignments rules are very
clear. In the new Europe 2020 strategy for growth in the European Union,8 a new set
of input variables and rules are stated for the assignment of funds. Some of them are:
Diversification of crops: some crops, for example, are proved to be better di-
oxide carbon fixer;
Maintenance of existing permanent pasture;
Ecological focus areas (EFA) on farms (determined by each member country
within the categories established by the EU);
Sustainable, based on a greener economy (“greening”), and a more effective
and competitive management of resources.
The definition of a parcel or farm “greening” value is open to interpretation. Nev-
ertheless, it should be as objective as possible because it is going to define a large
proportion of final funds assignments. Quoting the UK government: “Farmers are
required to implement ‘greening’ measures by EU rules, or they will lose up to 30%
8 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV:em0028
of their Basic Payment Scheme payment. The greening rules cover three areas – crop
diversification, Ecological Focus Areas, and measures to maintain permanent grass-
land.”9
Therefore, defining an objective set of rules based on observable variables is man-
datory to build the new CAP funds assignment services as error-free as possible in
order to obtain the fairest compensation for farmers and land owners.
Thankfully, all the required data to define ecological focus area surfaces, kind of
crops or grassland cover is already available. Therefore, the main task of CAPAS
business case is to share new, and often underused, datasets and cross check the refer-
ences in order to obtain a clearer and better picture of crops state. Due to the use of
some of these new datasets, development of new processing algorithms and business
rules are needed.
Henceforth, CAPAS Service is being designed as an improved version of the exist-
ing service of Common Agriculture Policy funds assignments10 to farmers and land
owners by making better use of data related to agricultural and urban ownership, to-
gether with environmental and biodiversity data, creating a new product with added
value to those provided by the producers of these data. This will also create innova-
tive services and new and features which will provide an easier management, integra-
tion and reuse of data.
Value Proposition. The focus of the CAPAS business case is to publish and integrate
multi-sectorial data from several sources into an existing data-intensive service target-
ing better and fairer Common Agriculture Policy funds assignments to farmers and
land owners. The goal is to leverage data integration from several sources to better
calculate the funds assignments.
2 Technological Challenges
The main challenges related to the datasets considered in the CAPAS business case
context are that some of them are relatively large and it is not evident how they can be
set up and prepared to be processed by the existing algorithms. Another difficulty is
that the datasets are highly heterogeneous and data formats are diverse (SQLite, MS
SQL Server, Esri Shapes, RDF, .LAS and .LAZ LIDAR files, etc.).
In addition, data comes from several and varied sources, and from different sectors:
biodiversity, earth observation, administrative information about the types of crops,
property data, etc. Consequently, the capabilities needed to achieve a new improved
CAP service based on new, cross-sectorial data will be related with the treatment of
large amounts of data in different formats.
As depicted in Figure 2, the main technological challenge in CAPAS Business
Case is the dynamic process of integration of several external data sources in order to
obtain a definition of parcels parameters as objective as possible.
9 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cap-greening-criteria-announced
10 http://sigpac.mapa.es/fega/visor/
The goal is to leverage data integration facilities to properly implement the new set
of rules defined by European 2020 strategy.
Land Cover – Land Use
WMS, WFS - Inspire INSPIRE – EU 2020
Agricultural parcels
Free Maps Layers
Integration of data
from different
sources and scales
Lidar Dynamic process
Cadastre / Land
registration
Fig. 2. CAPAS Business Case General Architecture
The CAPAS business case is based on several groups of data. Some of them very
well know and adequately exploited. In this case the challenge is related to their dy-
namic processing:
Public administration data about parcel information and statistical data
(MAGRAMA – Spanish ministry of agriculture, INE – Spanish statistical
office, Data from Autonomous Regions)11
Spanish national geographic institute (IGN) data about land cover and
land use12
Information provided by owners, hosted by MAGRAMA & Tragsa
Cadastre information13
Other datasets are underused or unfamiliar. For example, LIDAR14 data is a very
powerful source for earth observations. It is in the order of TBs and could be consid-
ered, properly, as Big Data.
11 http://wms.magrama.es/wms/wms.aspx?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.0&REQUEST=
GetCapabilities
12 http://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/index.jsp
13 http://www.catastro.meh.es/default_eng.asp
14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar
LiDAR
CLASSES
Fig. 3. LIDAR points ranked Vegetation and Soil
As shown in Figure 3, LIDAR point clouds not only show an accurate description
of relief and elevations, but also a precise identification of vegetation height. This
parameter, processed together with images (shape of treetops, leaves colour, etc.) give
a clear idea of vegetation type.
After data collection and data processing is completed, it is time to use the data to
define properly, objectively, and without errors, all the input variables that will be
used in the funds assignment rules.
Unfortunately, defining the crops and parcel variables and parameters is not an
immediate process and it involves several parameters such as:
Soil characterization
Vegetation cover parameters
Crop diversification
Type, density and surface of Ecological Focused Areas
Proximity or overlapping to Sites of Community Interest (SICs)
Proximity or overlapping to natural parks and protected sites
Proximity of overlapping to Special Bird Protection Area
Some examples regarding the rules applied are:
Crop Diversification: “A farmer must cultivate at least 2 crops when his arable
land exceeds 10 hectares and at least 3 crops when his arable land exceeds 30 hec-
tares. The main crop may cover at most 75% of arable land, and the two main crops at
most 95% of the arable area.”
Kind, density and surface of Ecological Focused Areas: Maintaining an “ecologi-
cal focus area” of at least 5% of the arable area of the holding for farms with an area
larger than 15 hectares (excluding permanent grassland) – i.e. field margins, hedges,
trees, fallow land, landscape features, biotopes, buffer strips, afforested area. This
figure will rise to 7% after a Commission report in 2017 and a legislative proposal.
3 Rule-based Approach
Rule technologies have a high potential for addressing the technical challenges in this
business case. Specification and implementation of business rules can assist in the
process of data integration and eventually decision making for funds assignments. In
order to achieve a certain level of automation in this process, machine-readable rules
(in rule languages such as RuleML, SWEL, R2RML, F-logic – depending on the re-
quired expressivity and tool support) need to be created and implemented. The
sources of such machine-readable rules vary, with rules defined in legal documents
being predominant. The following reference documents are sources for the rules
based on which this business case relies.
Europe 2020 strategy for growth in the European Union: The Commission pre-
sents the strategy that should enable the European Union (EU) to achieve growth – it
aims at “intelligent, sustainable, inclusive growth" with greater coordination of na-
tional and European policy.
Draft Law amending the Law 42/2007 of December 13, natural heritage and bio-
diversity changes (Spain):15 One of the most important changes introduced by the law
is the incorporation of environmental information in the Registry of Property. With
this option, the aim is to give greater legal certainty of property ownership within
protected areas, so that environmental information affecting these spaces has its re-
flection in the Land Registry.
PAC (common agricultural policy) 2015 – 2020. Practices beneficial for the cli-
mate and environment. Conditionality:16 This document defines the beneficial prac-
tices for the climate and environment and will define the funds assignment rules in
CAPAS business case. Specially, CAPAS will systematize the decision making in
regards of:
Diversification of crops: Checking current and historical data.
Maintenance of existing permanent pasture.
Ecological focus areas (EFA) on farms (determined by each member country
within the categories established by the EU). Examples of queries to be an-
swered include: Are there EFAs in a specific parcel? How large are they?
What is the surface ratio between arable lands and EFAs surfaces?
Conditionality: This concept is diffuse and open to interpretation – obligations
relating to the environment, good agricultural condition of land, public health,
vegetation health and animal health and welfare. The landscape elements to be
preserved and that will define the Conditionality include field margins, trees in
group, trees in line, isolated tress, hedge, woods, groves, etc.
As already highlighted, the agricultural funds assignment is a complex process cur-
rently open to subjective interpretation that could generate unfair assignments of
funds. A corollary is the high audit costs related with inaccurate assignment spent by
15 http://www.magrama.gob.es/es/biodiversidad/participacion-publica/Borrador_Modificaci%C
3% B3n_Ley_42_2007_tcm7-346812.pdf
16 http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/agriculture/general_framework/l60002_es.htm and
http://ec.europa.eu/news/agriculture/111012_es.htm
Public Administration. In order to avoid this, a set of business rules need to be devel-
oped paying attention also to all legal boundaries and restrictions.
By using rules technologies for supporting the data integration task and the proce-
dure for assignments of funds, the CAPAS business case will provide the Spanish
Public Administration with a powerful new approach and tool oriented towards a
better service for land owners and a better use of public funds. Technically, this will
be achieved through the use of new datasets (currently underused) combined with
new processing algorithms and the definition and use of rules based on several legal
restrictions.
4 Results
The results of cross-use of several and different data sources is a more accurate defi-
nition of soil, crops and vegetation description that will reduce significantly the need
to rely on data provided by funds receivers and replace it with more 'objective' data
that can be collected and integrated from different cross-sectorial sources in a more
automated way.
Currently, and using the tools and datasets already available, TRAGSA has devel-
oped an improved version of CAP viewer, offering several new layers to farmers and
land owners, as shown in Figure 4.
Fig. 4. CAP Spanish Viewer
Analyzing aerial images, TRAGSA has created a first version of Ecological Fo-
cused Areas layer, allowing owners to know if a specific section of their parcel could
be considered as EFA and how big the sections are.
Other layers developed and published include:
1. Permanent pasture
2. Landscape elements
3. Crop protection products (pollution produced by)
Therefore, TRAGSA is currently developing new information layers based on pre-
existing datasets that will be improved with the information coming from new sources
as LIDAR. These new static layers could be considered as a draft version of the
CAPAS Dynamic stage (see Figure 2) that will offer improved data dynamically.
All this information will be the input parameters for the Business Rules that will
define, eventually, the CAP assignments for a specific farm and its owner.
5 Importance and Impact
Due to the fact that data submitted by rural banks or owners could be incorrect or
inaccurate, the Spanish public administration has to devote several resources to audit
the data in order to avoid an unfair assignment of funds. In the same way, an inaccu-
rate specification of the kind of crop or the surface of the Areas of Ecological Interest
(AEI) turns out in incorrect grant assignments for owners.
The Official Journal of the European Union reports 17 that the overall incorrect
grant assignments funded by Member States, in 2012, was more than 230 Million
Euros. This amount has to be recovered from the Member State to European Union.
As a specific example, UK will have to return 10.3 Million Euros due to incorrect
identification of type of crops. With the use of the improved CAPAS algorithm, this
Member State could save, directly, a total amount close to 7 Million Euros, not in-
cluding audit expenses and administrative charges. Furthermore, several paying agen-
cies from 5 other European countries (Denmark, Germany, France, Romania, and
Spain) will be subjected to later clearance decisions.
This new improved service developed as part of this business case is expected to
have the following impacts and outcomes:
Exploitation and Valorisation of cross-sectorial data sources;
Publication and use of currently collected but unused datasets in the distribu-
tion of funds algorithm;
New data processing algorithms over LIDAR Big Data;
Cadastre and Ownership information enriched with biodiversity infor-
mation: Species distribution, Sites of Community Interest (SICs), Special
Protected Areas for Birds (SPABs), etc.;
Implementation of European 2020 CAP funds assignment rules.
The CAPAS business case is expected to improve substantially the efficiency and
competitiveness of the widely used existing service, by integrating more datasets,
currently unused. As a result, the Spanish administration and citizens will obtain more
accurate information regarding rural and agricultural parcels. The ownership infor-
mation, enriched with environmental information as EFAS (Ecological Focus Areas)
will allow owners to request different kinds of Common Agricultural Policy funds
17 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32013D0209&qid=
1397837441272
and this request will be validated and justified by objective and reliable rules and
information.
On the other hand, the opportunities to internationalize this improved service pow-
ered by a better algorithm based on new data sources are very clear due to the fact that
it solves a common challenge that is present in all Common Agricultural Policy funds
assignment services in Europe.
The main direct customer for this improved service is the current customer, the
Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, which in turn offers it to land owners or, more often,
to rural banks, rural labour unions or SMEs that hire their services to the land owners.
These actual users will continue to be an important group, but will not be the only
ones. In this sense, all Ministries for Agriculture in the Member States could be inter-
ested in this improved service. Furthermore, this transfer process is not new to Tragsa.
Due to the administrative organization of the Spanish state, the CAP fund assignment
tool is the result of a merging process of several regional funding services. In addi-
tion, the Global CAP platform is finally transferred and adapted to regional agencies18
in order to use and improve local features. In addition, the use of rules and advanced
algorithms for Big Data processing in order to determinate accurate land use and land
surface will be useful not only in agricultural environments, but is also a powerful
tool that could be applied to other domains such as: cadastre reports, property taxes,
land classification (urban land, development land or land not for development, etc.).
Through its International Unit, Tragsa Group operates in a wide range of countries
including Portugal, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Morocco, Tunisia,
Egypt, Angola, Syria, The Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, Brazil and Para-
guay. Overseas, Tragsa Group cooperates on a regular basis with the Spanish Agency
for International Cooperation, the European Commission, the Interamerican Devel-
opment Bank and the World Bank. The internationalization of the group facilitates the
exploitation and dissemination of results through meetings, conferences, publications
and websites and the exportation of the final products to new markets. Tragsa is plan-
ning to use this connection to its International Unit to further promote and exploit the
CAPAS service.
Acknowledgements. The work on the CAPAS business case is partly supported by
the EC funded projects proDataMarket (Grant number: 644497) and SmartOpenData
(Grant number: 603824).
18
https://www.fega.es/PwfGcp/es/ayudas_dir_desa_rural/aplicacion_sigpac/sigpac_visores_au
tonomicos_236.jsp