During past 10 years Turkey has implemented several projects related to fully functional alike IACS establishment, including software development. Consequently, following the completion of these projects, the next step for Turkey is to start using the alike IACS for managing the agricultural subsidies as planned, but there is big challenge in the first year of alike IACS implementation – delineated farmers agricultural parcels missing. Turkey need to manually delineate 25 000 000 ha of agricultural land (including meadows) inside LPIS reference parcels (physical blocks), which should be done by municipalities (sometimes farmers) in a short period of time while collecting the GSAA and each year, keeping in mind the land cadastre data, based on which part of current farmers agricultural parcels are delineated in the Farmers register.
In other to solve the above described problem, Turkey Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MOAF) try to find new techniques and solutions in order to help the farmers and municipalities with the filling and submission of GSAA (the so called Prefilled subsidy application). One of the new solutions, that MOAF wanted to explore in more detail – NIVA project UC2 solution for automated agricultural parcel preliminary boundary detection and delineation.
In the end of November through online webinar UC2 experts presented the UC2 solution to 30 staff members of MOAF. The goal of the experts was to help MOAF explore the new techniques, which help to prefill the farmers GSAA with parcel preliminary boundary and crop, and how those could be applied in Turkish alike IACS in order to make it more effective and help faster to start the use of IACS system.
The experts presented:
- The future EC plans of IACS modernisation (inclusion of Area Monitoring System and Geotag photo mobile application);
- Existing problems in EU Member States regarding the inaccurate agricultural parcel boundaries;
- How incorrect agricultural parcel boundaries influence the future Area Monitoring System;
- Planned KPIs to be reached by applying the automated agricultural parcel preliminary boundary detection and delineation tool (algorithm);
- A methodology of automated agricultural parcel preliminary boundary detection and delineation based on Sentinel data;
- The problems with automated agricultural parcel preliminary boundary detection and delineation and how to solve them (small, narrow, long agricultural parcels and other);
- How to execute the automated agricultural parcel preliminary boundary detection and delineation tool (algorithm) on MOAF IT infrastructure;
- Delineation results in Lithuania, Spain and Hungary pilot areas;
- The quality control procedure of the delineation results;
- The future plans of EU Member States regarding automated agricultural parcel preliminary boundary detection and delineation tool (algorithm).
During the discussions it was concluded, that most of problems and needs are the same in EU Member States and Turkey. The UC2 solution could be a major help for Turkey by saving enormous time and resources, thus, making it much easier and faster to start the use of alike IACS, so Turkey plans to test the UC2 solution in the pilot Turkey area in near future.