The deployment of the common European agricultural data space is off to a strong start
25 juni 2025
Initiated on April 1, 2025, the Common European Agricultural Data Space (CEADS) initiative officially kicked off with a three-day assembly in early May in Ghent (Belgium). Co-funded by Digital Europe the initiative is overseen by Flanders research institute for agriculture, fisheries and food (ILVO). The project consortium brings together 36 participants from 15 countries, who will collaborate over the next 36 months to deploy and operationalize secure, sovereign and trusted data sharing, including public administration, across the agrifood value chain.
CEADS is designed to enhance economic, environmental, and societal value in European agriculture while maintaining high standards of privacy, security, and ethics. By enabling secure and trusted data sharing, CEADS will drive smart, sustainable farming, support AI-powered innovation, boost economic performance, create climate resilience and ecological balance and accelerate both the digital and green transitions in agriculture. This initiative is a direct response to the European Strategy for Data and builds on the foundations laid by the AgriDataSpace project (2022-2024), which mapped the landscape and defined the roadmap for a federated, decentralized data space model for agriculture.
“Just as every successful harvest starts with data, we are planting the ‘CEADS’ for Europe’s agrifood data future,” Jürgen Vangeyte, director at ILVO, pointed out.
During the kick-off meeting, all consortium partners outlined the strategic framework to achieve these ambitious key objectives:
- facilitating high-quality agrifood data,
- unlocking value from real-life data exchange,
- establishing operational and trusted data governance,
- deploying sustainable business models for data sharing,
- applying ethical and legal data standards,
- implementing secure and interoperable technical infrastructure, and
- connecting data space initiatives into an EU wide agricultural data space.
The project will be implemented iteratively, engaging key stakeholders and leveraging open calls to ensure broad representation and participation from all EU Member States.
For further details on initiative goals, upcoming activities, advancements, and outcomes, visit the CEADS website: https://ceads.eu/ or contact the consortium directly at ceads@ilvo.vlaanderen.be
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.