By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager
As I write this, the remains of a recent blizzard have me looking out the window at the melting snow and hopeful that spring is just around the corner in my part of the world. AgGateway working groups are similarly starting to wrap up, with several on track to sunset ahead of the mid-year meeting in North America. At the same time, new topics are popping up with a few meetups being organized to gauge interest and set the scope for the new efforts.
Don’t forget – North America Mid-Year Meeting registration is now open (8 to 10 June in Altoona, Iowa), and the staff have been working to tweak the agenda and structure again to help make sure members get the most out of their time in Altoona. Check out the agenda to see what’s planned and book your spot before rates increase. If you are a user of Modus, make sure you check out the GitHub repository and issue board. Following alignment efforts to synchronize better between the new plant tissue method list, the manure method list and the soil method list a big update will be posted for discussion among the community on the issue board. Most of the changes are fairly straightforward but we want to make sure everyone has a chance to share their thoughts.
The Field Operations Controlled Vocabulary group is close to having their different orthogonal values defined – this is needed to create the unique components to identify field operations. They have pulled in examples from field operations lists used in Japan, the US and the Netherlands to test out the structure. Next up they will be working on a sub-component that is needed to describe equipment used in an operation. But the team is on track to wrap up ahead of the Mid-Year Meeting in early June.
Crop Protection Work Record is also close to wrapping up. Their gap check has not revealed any glaring misses in the ADAPT Standard model needed to report on field operations. There is likely some mapping and gap checking needed for specific reporting schemes, but there’s not much more for this group to address. Some of their findings are moving over to the ADAPT Standard open source community to discuss a rather fundamental change to not include data by reference but put values directly in the model. This will likely help with some of the packaging needed for reporting and make the data a little easier to work with. So if you have thoughts or needs in that area, make sure you are following the ADAPT Standard issues on GitHub and on the now monthly ADAPT calls.
The Field Boundary Obstacles team has wrapped up most of their use case work and are now digging into some existing standards to see how best to model 3D information while also working on the requirements and overall data model for obstacles. It is a challenging topic to stay focused on “true field obstacles” and not drift into discussing buffer zones and other parts of a field that may be related but are not actual obstacles.
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@aggateway.org), or sign up for a working group here.
2026 April Member Updates
From The President | Lorem Ipsum
Portfolio Update | Spring Brings Working Group Renewal
Education | Instructional Video and Resources Available on Process Modeling
AGIIS Insider | The Power of Synchronizing
Outreach | AgGateway’s Work Spans the Globe
Latin America | March Member Meeting
In The Classroom | Data Ethics White Paper Anchors Inter-Industry Seminar