Policy Monitoring Tool
Why it Matters
Agricultural policymakers across Europe are increasingly expected to make data-driven decisions. Yet the data they need – generated daily on thousands of farms – is often fragmented, unstructured and difficult to use at the regional level.
From individual farm measurements to regional policy insights. That’s the challenge the Policy Monitoring Tool is designed to address.
Developed by Neuropublic within a sub-lab of the ScaleAgData Crop Management Research & Innovation Lab, the tool transforms complex farm-level information into reliable regional indicators that support evidence-based implementation and monitoring of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
The solution is being developed and demonstrated in key agricultural regions of Greece, including Thessaly, Crete and Central Macedonia, with a focus on strategically import crops such as cotton, tomato, potato and wheat. It builds on Neuropublic’s long-standing expertise in agricultural information systems and CAP monitoring, leveraging the company’s existing IoT infrastructure and digital farm services.
The Challenge
Policymakers are interested in regional trends and impacts rather than individual farm measurements. They need to know whether cotton-growing areas are experiencing water stress, how pesticide use is evolving across farming groups, or whether CAP sustainability targets are on track.
Generating these insights requires combining data from fundamentally different sources: sensors deployed on individual fields, satellite imagery covering entire regions, and farm management records submitted by thousands of farmers with varying levels of digital literacy. These datasets differ in format, spatial resolution and update frequency, while the farm-level records are legally sensitive and require robust governance before they can be meaningfully shared.
Bridging this gap requires much more than data collection. It demands a complete pipeline that transforms farm-level measurements into transparent, reproducible and legally relevant regional indicators.
The Solution
To address this challenge, the ScaleAgData team has developed and deployed a scalable Policy Monitoring Dashboard. This platform provides regional authorities and advisory organizations with a dynamic, query-driven interface for agricultural monitoring.
Users simply select a region and a crop type, after which the dashboard automatically loads the available yearly data and presents aggregated agro-environmental performance indicators derived from IoT sensor measurements, Earth Observation (EO) products and harmonized farm management records.
Behind the scenes, the underlying data pipeline integrates measurements from 18 IoT weather stations (Gaiatron, part of NP’s Gaiasense platform), Sentinel-2-derived vegetation indices (NDVI, NDRE, LAI, NDWI and PSRI), and crop classifications generated by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model.
Farm management records – including irrigation, fertilization, spray events and harvest data – are processed through the Agriculture Information Model (AIM) semantic translation pipeline, which harmonizes information from different farm management systems into a common format before aggregation.
All farm-level data is anonymized before being made available through the dashboard or its REST API, while access control and provenance tracking are maintained throughout the process. This enables policymakers to access meaningful regional insights while safeguarding the privacy of individual farmers.
One of the most novel features of the Policy Monitoring Tool is the integration of automated pesticide spray-event detection. A custom nanoparticle gas-sensing array, assembled by Neuropublic and deployed in two tomato pilot parcels, classifies field spray events in near real time as ‘no spray’, ‘water spray’ or ‘pesticide spray’. These validated detections feed directly into the dashboard’s analytics, providing policymakers with objective, on-farm evidence of pesticide use. While currently limited to showing the pilot farms data, scaling this approach could significantly strengthen CAP sustainability KPI monitoring by providing insights that go beyond self-reported farm records alone.
What's next?
The next phase of the project is focused on the exploration of expanded capabilities for the Policy Monitoring Tool.
Through collaboration with LUKE, the integration of RIL’s field measurements with a wheat digital twin will be assessed for its potential to generate spatially explicit regional yield estimates and complement the dashboard’s agro-environmental indicators.
In parallel, the team will explore the application of DHI’s soil moisture estimation product in the pilot regions and validate the results using Neuropublic’s sensor network.
By combining field observations, satellite imagery and harmonized farm management records into trusted regional intelligence, the Policy Monitoring Tool demonstrates how agricultural data can support smarter, evidence-based policymaking and contribute to a more sustainable, resilient European agricultural sector.
