Can farmers share environmental information once and use it across multiple organisations?
Farm environment plans have become an important mechanism for documenting agricultural practices, environmental risks and regulatory requirements. However, farmers and growers frequently face different information requirements from regional councils, industry organisations, auditors and commercial service providers.
Trust Alliance New Zealand (TANZ) led a collaborative research project, co-funded through the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures programme, to investigate whether a decentralised data-sharing framework could improve the management of farm environment planning information.
The research identified that farm environment plans did not follow a single standardised format. Different organisations required different information, and the requirements varied according to farming activity, geographical location and regulatory context.
Farmers frequently needed to recreate information already held in other systems, including farm boundaries, management practices and environmental records. This created duplication, administrative costs and difficulties exchanging information between systems.
The project examined how digital identity, verifiable credentials and permissioned information sharing could support farm environment planning. A proposed Farm Enterprise Digital Wallet would enable farmers to receive verified information from recognised organisations and share relevant credentials with authorised recipients.
The research also explored a farm location registry through which verified geographical information could be reused by multiple farm management applications.
The research demonstrated that improving farm information exchange required more than a common reporting form. It required mechanisms for identifying farming enterprises, verifying information, establishing consistent definitions and enabling controlled sharing between independent systems.
A decentralised approach offered a pathway for improving interoperability without requiring every participant to adopt the same software platform.
The project established the importance of trusted farm identity, reusable information and farmer-controlled data sharing. It also highlighted the wider opportunity to use verified agricultural information beyond environmental planning, including supply-chain assurance and market access.
The following reports provide an overview of the Digital Farm Environment Planning research project, led by TANZ and co-funded by its members and the Ministry for Primary Industries through the Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures programme.
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