Data flow

Abstract
This section provides an overview over the general data flow within the model. It addresses all relevant information related to data sourcing/collection, data processing pre- and during the simulation and the structure of the database.

Data in Farmdyn is primarily collected from books, literature and online databases. The collected data populates directly the exogenous parameters or is processed in order to be harmonized with data from other sources (figure 1). The parameters are stored in .gms or .gdx files, where each file deals with a specific domain of the farm. This includes, for example, cattle.gms, which stores data on all kind of information for dairy, beef and mothercow farms, or crops_de.gms which stores and processes information for crops and cropping activities. The database is not only domain specific but also country specific. The suffix _de in the name of crops_de.gms, for instance, indicate that the parameterization with this file would provide crop information for German conditions. For some domains, FarmDyn also contains information for the Netherlands, Norway, and Swizz. In line with the idea of modularity in FarmDyn, each data file in the database corresponds to a certain module. This allows to call only those data files which are necessary to run a simulation which was set-up in the GUI configurator. Parameters from the called database are then processed further in order to fit to the defined model configuration and can then be used in the simulation run.

Figure 1: General data flow in FarmDyn Source: Own illustration