Building Practical and Usable Solutions

From the President

Building Practical and Usable Solutions

By Brent Kemp, President and CEO

I am occasionally asked about my “AgGateway Why” – that is, why I have chosen to invest my time as a volunteer and a staff member to this organization and its work. The answer I always give is that AgGateway and its members are solving real problems for the industry. The questions and problems raised by our member volunteers are real, and the solutions developed are practical and usable.

With a full quarter to go yet in 2024, this has already been a fruitful year for everyone involved in AgGateway activities with the Annual Conference coming up fast on the horizon. Below are three outstanding examples of work that has made significant progress toward “practical and usable” solutions, driven by member volunteer participation and staff leadership.

  1. The industry has, as long as I’ve been a part of it, relied on certain understandings of what constitutes a manufacturer, a distributor, a retailer, etc., in the context of product reporting and other supply chain messaging. As our use cases for data from these types of transactions expanded, the need to very specifically define entity types became apparent. Not only did we need to become more specific in our definition, but we also needed to align on multiple aspects of the data – how it is collected, what party collected it, and where expectations between data providers and data consumers may differ. The team working together in WG27 is currently addressing this and setting the stage for the next 25+ years of entity identification for message exchange.
  2. Our working group on Data Ethics and Stewardship is another good example of the practical approach we take. Responding to the conversations taking place among our members, as well as the increasing regulatory scrutiny of data and data sharing, volunteers determined there was value in revisiting an existing AgGateway resource. The discussions the group is having, and the content they are reviewing from agriculture and wider sectors, will result in a white paper that educates and makes recommendations on how organizations can understand the current issues involved and respond in a flexible, responsible manner.
  3. AgGateway work is applicable in broader contexts as well. Our Field Boundaries working group and ADAPT Standard effort has been presented to USDA personnel interested in ways agricultural data are being collected and exchanged. Our initial presentation was received very positively and branched into several adjacent areas, including feed inputs and livestock processes. They were particularly pleased to learn of AgGateway’s “don’t reinvent the wheel” approach to standards work. These discussions are still in early phases but are promising starts to build awareness of the work industry is doing to make agriculture more efficient and sustainable.

Our end users – farmers – expect that we will effectively support them, even if they don’t know about all the connectivity, message formats, transport layers, and reference directories that make such things happen. They value practicality and usability. As agriculture becomes more connected, and as AgGateway’s work becomes more relevant past the farm gate, the complexity of the questions we address will increase. We are well prepared and positioned to meet those challenges and continue building practical solutions that enable member companies to succeed.