A major shortcoming up to now was that the data was not yet available electronically. In order to be able to use this data in the digital age, three state ministries (Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Rural Areas and Consumer Protection, Ministry of the Environment) started the lighthouse project "Soil Estimation Digital" as part of the initiative "digital@bw". The aim is to make the descriptive data of the soil profiles available in a database and the graphic data in the automated real estate cadastre (ALKIS) at the State Office for Geoinformation and Land Development Baden-Württemberg by the end of 2022. With the transfer of more than 500,000 handwritten soil profiles with more than 6 million individual characteristics into the digital world, it was possible to secure valuable, up to 90-year-old basic data for estimating the natural yield capacity of agricultural soils in Baden-Württemberg.
In the future, both the graphical and the descriptive data are to be collected digitally in the field, processed in the office and then transferred to the automated real estate cadastre of the surveying administration (ALKIS). To this end, the tax authorities are planning to equip their agricultural experts with the appropriate specialist software for processing geoinformation data and with robust, weather-resistant field computers with built-in high-precision GPS receivers before the end of 2021.