Productive Working Groups, Compelling Keynote Highlight 2025 Event

North America Mid-Year Meeting

North America Mid-Year Meeting

By Paul Schrimpf, Director of Marketing and Communications

The Mid-Year meeting returned to Altoona, IA last month and again delivered a solid three days of project work, networking, and learning for more than 100 attendees.

“The Working Groups and Committees came together and were ready to review progress and make decisions on courses forward for the second half of the year,” says Portfolio Manager Ben Craker. “We’ll have a number of new and continuing projects to focus on as we build toward the Annual Meeting and Conference in Florida in November.”

Click here for a post-conference portfolio update.

Capping the meeting was the second in-person gathering of the Entity ID Working Group, which met over two days to further solidify consensus around terminology for agriculture organizations. “Our CTO Jim Wilson did an excellent job as moderator, building support and gaining consensus while giving every member in attendance the opportunity to voice their opinion,” says Brent Kemp, AgGateway President and CEO. “We’re in a great position to make continuing progress through the remainder of the year, and we sincerely appreciate the contributions of every member in the room.”

The education sessions and keynote speaker provided plenty of food for thought as well.

Curt Blades, Senior Vice President of Industry Sectors & Product Leadership at the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, shared its Joint Technology Leadership Group’s work on establishing a common Language for autonomy, cybersecurity, and data layers across both agriculture and construction in non-road equipment. Sven Nowak, Head of Cyber Security and Functional Safety at TÜV Rheinland of North America, discussed common misconceptions about cybersecurity in system environments and explored effective methods for mitigating cyber risks at a system-wide level.

Keynote presenter Matt Waits, Strategy Lead and co-founder of consulting firm TwelveFive, drew on his more than two decades of experience as an agtech executive to deliver his thought-provoking talk, “Beyond Standards – Building the Integration Ecosystem Agriculture Actually Needs.”

Matt’s presentation provided an interesting retrospective on data and technology in agriculture from his unique perspective, and a compelling view of the future,” says Jeremy Wilson, AgGateway Executive Vice President/COO and North American Director. “He shared many of the hurdles he faced during his time as an executive at SST Software and Proagrica, and offered some interesting ideas to consider that he feels would allow more streamlining of data interoperability within our industry. This presentation spurred many conversations among members about the role AgGateway plays in our industry in the short and medium term.”

 

“My main goal in presenting was to challenge how we think about interoperability—specifically, to ask whether our long-standing reliance on rigid standards is the only way forward, or if a new path might be emerging through AI,” says Waits. “The response from attendees was energizing. I had conversations with people from across the industry—retailers, software providers, manufacturers—who all seemed to resonate with the idea that integration is too important to be left to brute-force methods or isolated approaches.

“What gives me real optimism,” he continues, “is the growing awareness that we don’t all have to agree on a single standard or system — but we can agree to make our systems more transparent, more intelligible, and more interoperable. If we do that, I think the future of data in agriculture becomes much more agile and resilient.”