April Portfolio Update

Portfolio Update

APR Portfolio Update

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

March was a great month for the Portfolio Management Center. We got to experience several examples of how digital resources developed by AgGateway are being adopted to solve problems in the industry.

Meanwhile, progress by Working Groups has been encouraging and led to several new people signing up for a seat at the table. This is a clear sign that the industry recognizes the value of the work we are doing and people want to participate and help resolve some of these long standing interoperability issues.

On The Road

I first travelled to OATSCON23, an event held by the Purdue Open Agriculture Technology Systems (OATS) Center. There was a live demonstration of how they are using Modus to help move the needle on soil health issues and make lab test results easier to use, and they can’t wait for the full release of v2 of Modus. I made some new contacts there who are very interested in helping with WG00 Agrisemantics and building a crop list model as the first proof of concept for AgGateway Agrisemantic resources. Additional discussions on traceability and data needs for sustainability reporting recognized the pivotal role AgGateway is playing to enable the industry to meet these demands.

Jim Wilson and I attended the AEF Plugfest and Commodity Classic in Orlando. It was great to see equipment and software providers from around the world sitting down in the same room to check that their products are compatible under the ISO11783 standard. We also had some good meetings with AEF representatives who are working on the Agriculture Interoperability Network (AgIN) project. Some key AgGateway member volunteers were engaged with the AgIN team for a 1.5-day session. An initial plan was developed to leverage the strengths of both AEF and AgGateway to help move the industry forward on cloud-to-cloud interoperability.

Working Group Progress

In addition to fruitful travel, the Working Groups took great strides forward. Both WG13 Closed Loop Spray and WG04 Ag Lab Data were able to hand some of their deliverables over to the Digital Resource Center for review. This handover wraps up the work of the Closed Loop Spray team, as they start to look forward to forming a new Working Group focused on mapping several common European reporting models against the new ADAPT Standard model.

WG04 has finalized v2 of the soil test methods list and cleaned up and officially handed over some of the existing Modus resources to the Digital Resource Center. The group is now focusing on creating a v2 of the Modus schema that will be packaged together with the soil list for an official public release in the not too distant future. The team continued working through the manure nomenclature to move it to the v2 format. At Commodity Classic I was able to meet with several ag labs to increase awareness about Modus in general and let them know v2 is on the horizon.

The WG15 Scale Ticket team has been reviewing and making final tweaks to the first prototype of the OpenAPI spec for a digital scale ticket. This group is getting very close to being able to release a first version of the scale ticket and though the discussions have identified some additional gaps that are out of scope for the current effort. These might be something to review in the future – for example, an advanced ship notice (ASN) from a farmer to their elevator/processor.

WG20 Traceability API has completed the review of existing use cases and other past relevant materials. It is getting organized to finalize the data elements needed to enable traceability from system to system based on the Critical Tracking Event (CTE) and Traceable Resource Unit (TRU) concepts. These elements will be used to build a prototype API spec in the next phase of work.

As usual if you have any questions on the activities of any of these working groups or want to get engaged feel free to contact me (ben.craker@aggteway.org), or sign up for a working group here.