Tangible Success Sets Solid Course for 2024

From The President

Tangible Success Sets Solid Course for 2024

By Brent Kemp, AgGateway President and CEO

As 2023 winds down, I’d like to share a retrospective on our collective accomplishments so far this year. Many of the statistics I’m going to share were presented at the November annual meeting in Nashville. It was great to see and visit with so many of you there, and I note there are still some regional meetings yet to happen this year. So, some of these statistics are likely to increase before December 31.

We are ending the year having completed:

  • Eleven new digital resources delivered to Standards and Guidelines for publication
  • Nine new AGIIS enhancements, ranging from improved reporting and user access, to revisited business rules that support current practices
  • ADAPT component download counts exceeding 400,000

We traveled to and represented AgGateway success stories at nine industry meetings, shared our work and perspective with listeners around the world on a highly popular, widely distributed podcast, and set priorities for new and emerging work through 24 meet ups. As a result, three new working groups have spun up, and 17 new members have joined the organization.

And that was as of the end of October – two more working groups are in the process of spinning up before the end of the year.

These successes are attributable to the time, energy, and enthusiasm you contribute. Another way of looking at it might be that there are still problems to solve, you recognize the value of solving them together, and continue to see AgGateway as the place for that work to take place.

We recognized individuals – and a member company – at our annual meeting who have demonstrated sustained excellence at improving the industry, implementing resources, or leading efforts that developed new digital resources. Our regional AgGateway in Action Award recipients, Software Solutions Integrated, Guilherme Panes, and Udo Kaempf; the 2023 Ron Storms Leadership Award recipient Stuart Rhea; and the inaugural 2023 Ron Farrell Attitude Award recipient Ann Vande Lune have each demonstrated exceptional commitment to promoting, expanding, and enabling the transformation of our industry through standards-based data exchange. My thanks to you all for your time and involvement in AgGateway this year.

These successes aren’t stopping points, though. We are already preparing for new field boundary work, the revision of decade-old rules supporting identification in AGIIS, fresh efforts in animal agriculture, and the documenting of needs for climate data exchange. We’re engaged in regional and international discussions on agricultural data in standards, laboratory, and research contexts. And we are uniquely positioned to be able to help stakeholders map out the touch points, configurations, and processes by which data is created and exchanged to support visibility for sustainability and traceability programs.

Whether your organization is an input manufacturer or a retailer; a provider of agronomic services or business systems applications; an academic or a testing lab – or a stakeholder anywhere in the agriculture value chain – your processes will touch someone else’s, and your business will be more data driven than ever. Helping you embrace that data-driven future is what AgGateway is all about. Let’s feel proud of our successes, and then look ahead to the successes yet to come.