Rural AgTech Summit this Month

Latin America

Top Items Slated for Mid-Year Meeting Discussion

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

For those of us working in agriculture from the northern hemisphere it is a busy time of year. Some places are wrapping up planting others are just getting started, but either way there is a flurry of activity for most member-volunteers in their “day jobs.”

That often translates to working group meetings being a little more lightly attended than usual, and this year is no exception. In spite of this reality, progress is still being made.

And now, given that we are also just over a month away from the North America Mid-Year Meeting in Altoona, multiple working groups are pushing hard to wrap up their deliverables ahead of the opportunity to meet face-to-face to celebrate the success and look for the next set of issues to tackle. Below is a roundup of the latest:

The AgGateway staff have been busy conducting calls with individual companies participating in the End User ID working group. They have gathered some great feedback confirming the complicated nature of some underlying challenges and concerns that began to emerge at the Annual Meeting. They are now looking for feedback on the updated whitepaper. There will be a couple quick turns on the paper clarifying any open points so that at the Mid-Year Meeting the team can confirm the content of the paper and assess recommendations on what needs to happen to address the remaining issues.

The Modus group has a big update posted to GitHub right now, and is looking for feedback from users of the resource. A lot of progress has been made harmonizing values not only within a method list but across the soil, manure, and plant tissue lists. But one of the open questions is regarding Units of Measure. Moving to QUDT has opened up some more detailed questions on how some units work, and what level of detail is needed to ensure values are interpreted and used properly. Make sure to share your opinions on the GitHub issue.

The Field Operations Vocab team was closing in on a final draft when they discovered some pieces were just not fitting. This has led to a change in how they were grouping attributes to describe field operations, and the new path seems to be the right one. The team should be on track to have a recommendation ready for the ADAPT Standard team by the mid-year meeting.

The Field Boundary | Obstacles team has found a variety of different standards and resources that touch on several aspects of obstacles, but none that fully address the requirements from the use cases they documented. They are doing a lot of work to summarize and integrate these different resources into a solution that will work for agriculture. They have also reached out to other organizations like the AEF autonomy team to understand their needs to make sure the solution will be applicable.

As you can see, with the Mid-Year Meeting finish line rapidly approaching our volunteers have shifted into overdrive and most of the working groups are on track. As usual it will be a busy and informative meeting in Altoona, and a great opportunity to help us identify the next issues we need to address. Fortunately, we will have a new meeting format in place that will provide several opportunities to share and discuss. Check out my colleague Jeremy Wilson’s post on the roundtable concept by clicking here.

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.