Projects On Tap for 2026

Portfolio Update

Projects On Tap for 2026

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

As we roll into the holiday season, things sure do not seem to be slowing down around for AgGateway. After wrapping up a couple weeks of travel with the Annual Meeting and Conference, followed immediately by the sensory overload experience (and intense networking) that is Agritechnica, there is a lot of renewed interest and momentum behind a variety of working groups.

Field Boundary | Obstacles (WG34) is just starting the process of pulling together a proposal for the ADAPT Standard community to review on how to accurately share obstacle information between systems. Given the plethora of autonomous machines on display at Agritechnica, this is going to be a hot topic. Accurately transferring the position information of anything from one system to another is a critical capability for many of these innovations to achieve full field scale.

We are also in early talks to coordinate our efforts with the AEF AUT team that is working on the interoperability of autonomous systems. Sharing GNSS information is not in scope of their MVP, but it is at the heart of much of what AgGateway has done in the Field Boundary family of projects. In other words, it is a great opportunity to collaborate. This also has implications for the new ISO TC 347, so the impact of AgGateway member contributions of time and talent is being multiplied across the industry.

Version 2 of the Modus schema (WG33) is also getting underway. This corresponds with the ADAPT Standard group taking a harder look at integrating Observations and Measurements – as defined in ISO 7673-2 – into ADAPT. There are also other resources in the industry from OAGi and UN/CEFACT e-Crop and e-Lab for exchanging lab test data that would be great to harmonize with ADAPT Standard, but this will be no small task. The working group is going to review a lot of the past discussions to make sure the requirements for Modus are clearly documented to help provide a tangible use case to ground the ADAPT discussions and clarify what other resources can be potentially aligned.

WG31, is working through several examples from the Agricultural Activity Ontology (AAO) to determine a better way to document types of field operations. Their planned deliverable is a recommendation to the ADAPT Standard group and the Agrisemantics committee, likely a component model similar to the previous crop definition model. There will be tremendous benefits for stakeholders if ADAPT Standard had a scalable solution to allow systems and machinery to accurately communicate types of field operations across systems.

The Entity ID team had great discussions during the Annual Meeting. Following a review of a report that Jim Wilson put together documenting the discussions and areas of agreement so far, the group is now working though some additional details. The business rules, processes, and data requirements that drive uniquely identifying a grower is a significant task, but the team is steadily chipping away at the problem.

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