AgroView® has assisted more than 24,000 farmers

AgroView® is a comprehensive, yet robust and easy to use GIS-Software, designed especially for farmers. Farmers wanting to make an application for agricultural subsidy payments must define the location of their agricultural parcels in an established federal state reference system. For this purpose every year in March farmers receive an adapted version of AgroView® on CD which includes integrated current digital orthophotos as raster imagery and new vector data, such as cadastral information. Farmers can digitise the spatial extent of their own agricultural parcels and landscape elements, and then add attributes to these, such as parcel area, crop type, claimed aid schemes and so on. Direct import of GPS-data is possible in the ESRI shape file format, as is importing of data from the previous year. Reference points can also be set to provide information about necessary modifications to the existing reference system.

But AgroView® is designed for much more. In Saxony, for example, further forms can be generated with the so called "Application CD". Farmers can bundle a package containing their digital application on a data medium such as a CD. A data covering letter is automatically generated for each bundle of data, thus providing unique identification. Farmers that want to submit an application to the relevant state agricultural office need only to transfer the signed data covering letter and the corresponding bundle of data on a suitable digital medium. The advantages are obvious: no additional paper is necessary, no break in the chain of data, support is provided by plausibility checks in the program and, last but not least, use of data from the previous year speeds up the process. So in Saxony in 2007, applications for approximately 97 per cent of the agricultural areas were submitted digitally.