In conformity with the call of the European Commission, focused on the improvement of the access and use of public sector based information with specific orientation on transborder information services in the particular sector, Novitech a.s. along with its partners submitted the eFarmer project that was fully accepted by the European Commission. It is designed for the demonstration and dissemination of services provided to the wide farmers´ community within the V-4 countries.
The project started on January 1, 2005, and will be completed on February 28, 2007. After the end of the project it will become a self-contained commercial unit. The project was submitted within the frame of the eContent Programme and is developed with European Commission co-financing infrastructure. The objective of the project is to enhance and improve the information flow within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in relation to the diverse scheme options for the agricultural sector. These schemes come from the state administration and aim at farmers in the V-4 countries. An additional objective is to provide farmers and authorised agents (consultants, banks, farmer associations, organisations of the common market, etc.) instructions how to use these developed web services for the preparation, completion, formal check, and claim submission to national Rural Payment Agencies (RPA) through the Internet and this portal.
The market financial analysis, performed for this project, showed that if the eFarmers raise the awareness of farmers in the four demonstration countries by 10%, it would result in a total net profit for the farmers of approximately 275 mil Euros a year.
The project objectives:
1) The development of a system designed for CAP content transformation that shall produce up to date content services (eFarmer content) linked with farmers´ aid. This content will be accessible for the farmers´ community through the Internet on a regular internet browser. The online information will contain relevant, country specific information necessary for the farmers during their preparation and submission of claims (regulations, directives, application forms, cadastre and land maps, etc) in Hungary, Poland, Czech and Slovak Republics. As the available information within the eFarmer System is structured content, it will result in tailored information for the farmers within the system. When a farmer is interested in submitting his claim related to a single area payment scheme he does not need to study the complete handbook but he can look up detailed information focused in particular on that aid scheme and his farm characteristics. As an example, the farmer informs the system that he possesses 12 ha of land, raises pigs and poultry, and the systems offers him all the potential aid schemes he might apply for.
2) Introducing a package of web services to support farmers in their electronic claim submission. The system allows the farmers to request aid claims through the internet in a simple and comfortable way. the system covers the applications related to SAPS, LFA, national Top-Ups, etc. The application forms in the system are completed with any pc using any kind of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc). A wizard is in place to help the eFarmer completing the forms. The system performs automatic checks on the inserted data to eliminate errors and helps the farmers to submit correct claims to the RPA.
3) eFarmer pilot groups will be formed. These groups shall demonstrate the eFarmer content and communication services to the farmer communities. Official statistics of the European Union indicate a very low amount of pc and internet adoptation within the farmer communities. As a result it is one of the objectives of the project to increase this amount. For this reason eFarmers can represent other farmers without IT knowledge to perform these claims in his community. With the help of a notebook and wireless Internet connection the eFarmers shall visit farmers in their vicinity to provide them these services.
The farmers and farmer representative groups (agricultural association, farmers´ consultants, and financial institutions) shall have the following benefits:
- Obtain more entitled support by using the eFarmer services.
- Less efforts and costs – electronic claim submission removes postal and travel expenses
- Faster response (lower penalties) thanks to communication with the payment agency through the internet.
- Reduction of operation costs relating to the payment agency thanks to lower error rate of the submitted applications and thanks to electronic communication.