GTA prototype - Luxemburg

The ability to ensure the traceability of their production has become a major stake for the cereal sector because of the ever-growing demand from the market distribution and the consumers for food safety and quality.

Silocentrale is present at all stages of the cereal production, from the seed production to the marketing of the cereal end products. Consequently this company is pretty well positioned to develop a global traceability throughout the whole sector.

At the seed production level, the objective is to produce and make quality seeds available to farmers.
Seed quality means quality cultures. Seeds must meet quality standards (purity, cleanliness and germinative faculty) in order to be certified and marketed. Thus, cultures must be sowed far from the other fields of the same type, which could be a source of contamination.
It is in this context that an indicator of distances to be respected for the production of certified seeds is elaborated in the GeoTraceAgri project.

At the farm level, agronomic and technologic potentials of the sowed varieties have to be used at their best.
Moreover, the way the products are elaborated draws an increasingly important interest. Recent investigations carried out in France show that 10 % of the consumers are sensitive in their decisions of purchase to the way the product was elaborated (Gatel and al, 1999).
Setting up productions that follow precise requirements answers this point.
Thus, an indicator on the respect of the requirements of Silocentrale, which contains in particular requirements on the landscape preservation, is developed in the GeoTraceAgri project.

At the stocking level, products have to be stocked so as to preserve their quality.
The construction of new cells in silos and more generally the stocking policy of the stocking company allow to split the production according to the qualities required by the various markets. As part of its role, the stocking company has also to constitute batches that meet the requirements of the various customers.
Therefore, it is interesting for Silocentrale to have "predictive" indicators of cereal quality as well as harvest quality. This leads to the development of an indicator to estimate the Hagberg Falling Number, which measures the technological quality of cereals.

Bibliography

Gatel F., Martin G., 1999. Que revêt la notion de qualité ?, Perspectives Agricoles, n°-250, octobre 1999, pp 5-9.