A concept of a decentral server infrastructure to connect farms, secure data, and increase the resilience of digital farming

Abstract

With the intensified use and integration of digital technologies in agriculture, dependencies and constraints occurred which weakened the adoption and reduced effectiveness of innovative technology due to lacking interoperability and resilience. As awareness of these problems increased concepts have been developed to meet this issue with decentralized IT- infrastructures. With the proposed concept the authors aim to refine these existing infrastructures with concrete suggestions for server infrastructures. Off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software, enable cheap access to digital technologies yet provide sufficient support by choosing open-source tools with big or active communities. With the involvement of the machinery rings the economic advantages scale up because of the interfarm use of expensive technology. The farmservers on the farmside are the edge nodes of a regional network. The local machinery ring is the next node which is supposed to offer remote services for the farmers, who have a trustful partner in the machinery rings. The concept orients on revised requirements enriched by the results of a survey, conducted by the authors, adding the focus on interfarm cooperations. The concept meets the main constraints farmers face in digitalization: Data sovereignty, resilience, interoperability, high costs, and trust.