Digitalizing the farm through AFIR investment interventions: the intervention code decides the guide

In the agricultural holdings section, AFIR lists DR 20 investments in the livestock sector, DR 26 setting up irrigation systems, DR 30 support for the installation of young farmers, sub-measure 4.1 for simple purchases of agricultural machinery, DR 16 investments in vegetables and potatoes and DR 19 non-productive on-farm investments. Orchards have their own intervention, DR 15. The agricultural processing section carries DR 22, for conditioning, storage and processing of agricultural and fruit products, and DR 23, for processing into food and transformed products. Rural public utility infrastructure has DR 25, DR 27 and DR 28, and producer groups DR 33.

Codes DR-12, DR-14 and DR-18 do not appear in that list at the date of our check, and DR 30 is the young farmer installation intervention, not a processing one. We say so because both pairings circulate in presentation material, including in earlier versions of this page. The practical rule: open the relevant financing section on the agency portal, read the full intervention name next to the code, and only then download the guide.

Digitalization has no separate call in the PNS; it is a cross-cutting objective of the common agricultural policy, invoked directly in the description of the interventions. AFIR words the objective of intervention DR 20 as strengthening market orientation and increasing the competitiveness of agricultural holdings, including a greater focus on research, technology and digitalization, together with stimulating and sharing knowledge by promoting innovation and digitalization in agriculture and in rural areas.

For DR 26 the agency points explicitly to Specific Objective 2 of Articles 73 and 74 of Regulation (EU) 2021/2115 of 2 December 2021, with the same wording on research, technology and digitalization. That is the legal anchor for a software component inside an investment project: not a dedicated budget line, but the demonstrated contribution of the solution to the competitiveness of the holding.

In practice, in projects centred on the holding the software component takes the form of farm management applications — records of plots or herds, planning of field operations, cost per crop — complemented by sensors and monitoring equipment. In projects that include conditioning or processing, the emphasis shifts to batch traceability, from raw material to finished product, and to digitalizing production flows.

AFIR announces sessions individually, through its project submission sessions section, and the live state is read in the available funds counter — a table with the intervention, the sector, the session allocation, the launch date and time, the closing date and time, the submission cap, the value and number of projects submitted and the funds remaining. The agency itself warns that the values update with both submitted and withdrawn projects, so available funds can fall or rise during a session.

Amounts, aid intensity and eligibility criteria are those in the applicant guide of each intervention and each session. We publish no ceilings or scores taken from unofficial sources and we do not estimate figures the agency has not published. What can be stated without figures: farm digitalization scores at selection in the relevant interventions, and a project that documents its digital component seriously — with specifications, a budget and an identified supplier — stands better than one that mentions it in passing.

We are not agricultural consultants and we do not draft funding applications — the dossier stays with your consultant or your own team. We cover strictly the software component: we analyse the holding, propose a suitable solution, draft the technical offer and the budget by eligible cost category, then implement after contracting and hand over the acceptance documents needed for payment claims.

The limit that costs us: we issue no eligibility verdicts and we do not confirm that a cost qualifies. Even for software the decision belongs to the intervention guide and the evaluator, and if a solution we designed does not fit, we say so before submission rather than after. For the same reason we do not propose features that inflate the budget without serving the holding: when price reasonableness is checked, one unjustified line damages the whole budget.