Seven Solid Outcomes from the Annual Conference

Portfolio Update

Seven Solid Outcomes from the Annual Conference

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

As predicted, the Annual Meeting featured a flurry of activity. A surprising number of new working groups and meetups were identified by our engaged and enthusiastic member attendees.

There were also several working groups that presented deliverables for review and a bit of polishing. It should make the next Standards and Guidelines meeting being a pretty full one for anyone who’s interested in seeing the fruits of our volunteer labor. The year may be starting to wind down with the holiday season, but there is still a lot of activity going on in AgGateway.

New efforts identified or starting up include the following:

  1. After a slight delay, WG23 – focused on a standardized weather data API – will be kicking off this month. y. We finetuned the scope and deliverables a little at the annual meeting so now is the time to sign up to join the team if you ingest or provide weather data.

  2. We had a great discussion about data related to dairy feed. Again, a couple tweaks were made to the project charter but there was consensus on starting up a working group, WG25, to assess the dairy feed data landscape. We are continuing to pursue efforts to bring in a few more organizations that have not traditionally participated in AgGateway working groups so be sure to spread the word to anyone you may work with on feed data, enteric emissions reporting, or anything else related to dairy rations.

  3. Related to the dairy feed working group there was also consensus that we should put a little more structure around identifying needs for animal agriculture in general. We will be starting up a new advisory group within the Portfolio Management Center to help identify obstacles in the various industries and figure out if/when/how AgGateway could help, or what other organizations we should be collaborating with.

  4. The topic of data stewardship is one that has been coming up more in different circles recently. Following the meetup at Annual Conference we will be organizing a new working group to review the Data Privacy whitepaper AgGateway created back in 2014 that provided some of the foundational definitions and data categories leveraged by multiple industry efforts. The WG will determine if the white paper needs an update or what other resources might be in AgGateway’s wheelhouse to provide that can help address this perennial issue within the agriculture industry.

  5. During the data stewardship discussions there were also questions about data quality and how a recipient can know the suitable uses for data they receive. This discussion prompted the need for a meetup to further discuss the topic and see what might make sense. One example is the recent publication from ASABE/ANSI of S611 that documents best practices and considerations for yield data -- could we build on that work for planting or application data? If you have any interest in data quality metrics, visualization, provenance, or processing guidelines be sure to watch for info on that meetup early in 2024.

  6. GLN maintenance is something that continues to come up on how to better manage and reduce duplicates. Thoughts are still being collected on this but some sort of working group to provide guidelines is likely in order. This one will likely be a tough nut to crack based on the variety of ways GLNs are minted and assigned in various systems, so make sure your voice is heard.

  7. Building on the work done by the Scale Ticket project we were expecting to come out of the Annual Conference with a new working group to address the settlement sheet. However, during the discussion at the session, it was realized that before we could tackle the settlement sheet, we really needed to address contracts. This was also discussed in several other meetups as an area that could potentially be aligned within several industry segments. This will likely lead to further discussion on updating or migrating existing resources like AgXML, seed, crop nutrition, and crop protection messages to some of the newer tools we are using within AgGateway to manage standards and other digital resources.

For the working groups that are wrapping up, we will provide more of an update next month once they have completed final tweaks and everything has been approved by Standards and Guidelines.

If you have any questions or interest in any of these topics feel free to contact me to discuss them. And 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@aggateway.org), or sign up for a working group here.