The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) is driving Agrixels, the Agri-food Data Space. This structured, interoperable ecosystem allows the secure sharing of diverse data (on climate, soils, crops, health, carbon footprint, etc.) to improve decision-making, optimise resources and promote environmental and climate sustainability on farms. It currently links 240 companies nationwide, spanning 121,201 agricultural plots (totalling 115,714 hectares) across 812 cities in 25 provinces.

The UPC’s Agri-food Data Space structures and standardises agricultural information through a framework that defines how to organise and connect sector data to make them understandable, interoperable and useful across the entire value chain, while simplifying administrative processes.

The system integrates highly diverse data, from crops and phenology to sustainability and water consumption, and connects them with data on soil conditions, weather, traceability, irrigation management, farming practices and carbon market information. This common information structure enables public and private entities to cross-reference data securely and neutrally, analysing them to develop services. By applying artificial intelligence tools, it generates predictive models, advanced indicators and services that support decision-making, planning and innovation in the sector.

The project addresses the agri-food sector’s growing challenge of managing data that are often fragmented and in incompatible formats. It also resolves the lack of common standards and the difficulty of reliably applying AI to deliver useful services like models, monitoring systems and advanced reports.

Launch event featuring demonstrations and use cases 

The launch event, held at the Auditorium of the Vèrtex building on the North Diagonal Campus in Barcelona, brought together companies, cooperatives, technology centres, public administrations and clusters already participating in this ecosystem. Institutional representatives included UPC rector Francesc Torres; Anna Castellví Méndez, director of Barcelona Territorial Services at the Government of Catalonia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food; Anna Gras, the rector’s delegate for Agrotech-UPC, director of this agri-food technology research centre and professor at the Barcelona School of Agri-food and Biosystems Engineering (EEABB); and professor Cecilio Angulo, the rector’s delegate for AI, researcher at the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDEAI-UPC) research centre and head of the Agrixels-UPC ecosystem.  

UPC rector Francesc Torres stressed that “the keen interest from businesses and institutions allows us to grow the UPC ecosystem exponentially. This successful model demonstrates the power of triple-helix innovation: strategic collaboration between university, business and government. We want this initiative to have a real local impact, leading to more sustainable and competitive farming. The Agri-food Data Space is just the beginning of an ecosystem that will expand into sectors such as mobility, logistics and construction, among others.”

During the event, several demonstrations were given of the services currently available in the UPC’s Agri-food Data Space, which combine various technologies:

• a digital twin that predicts soil moisture at different depths;
• a tool that calculates CO₂ emissions associated with agricultural management;
• on-demand predictive models to forecast optimal crop harvest dates by type and variety;
• a tool to identify uniform geographical areas based on climate and agronomic data for better crop planning;
• a toolkit that transforms diverse agricultural data into standardised information suitable for advanced analysis.

This series of demonstrations showed how a well-managed data space can transform agricultural management, cut costs, anticipate risks and open up new opportunities for cooperatives, farms, tech companies and public administrations.

The rector’s delegate for AI, Cecilio Angulo, underlined that “many companies hold valuable data that are underutilised. The UPC Agri-food Data Space allows them to capitalise on and securely share these data to generate collective knowledge. Data ownership remains with each entity, but combining it provides a better understanding of the land and transforms how we manage agricultural information.”

Agrotech-UPC director Anna Gras stated that “the agri-food sector is the first to prove that a data space is a real tool for transformation. Today we are presenting an ecosystem that is already creating services, projects and opportunities across the region.”

Boosting strategic sectors such as mobility, logistics and construction

The Agri-food Data Space is the first fully operational component of the new shared data model, the UPC Data Space (UPCxels), a key infrastructure for the country’s digital future. This multi-sector ecosystem is being deployed by the University to promote data-driven innovation not only in agri-food but also in other strategic sectors such as mobility, logistics and construction.

These sector-specific data spaces are secure, neutral and interoperable environments that allow information to be shared with full control over ownership, clear rules of use, traceability, regulatory compliance and security guarantees.  They are not commercial data platforms, but trusted spaces that preserve each entity’s sovereignty.