AgGateway Participates in Purdue Agriculture’s OATS Center Pre-Launch

Open Source Technologies

AgGateway Participates in Purdue Agriculture’s OATS Center Pre-Launch

By Dr. James Krogmeier, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University

With support of agribusiness technology leaders like AgGateway, a university-based center to propel development and use of open-source technologies in agriculture is one step closer to reality. A “pre-launch” forum for Purdue’s Open Agricultural Technology and Systems (OATS) Center was held Nov. 17 in Rosemont, Ill., near Chicago. The event brought together 29 industry technology experts from 20 companies, including AgGateway representatives, to discuss priorities for future open-source development projects with 26 Purdue faculty, staff and graduate students from eight departments.

"We are really excited at the response we received at the OATS pre-launch forum,” said Aaron Ault, Purdue senior research engineer and founding member of the OATS Center. “It was great to see the start of an ag-focused, open-source community coming together to push the envelope around ideas for open-source innovation, education, research and outreach in agriculture.”

The OATS Center will accelerate innovation in the food and agricultural industry through the development and sharing of open-source tools. Projects will focus on harnessing the power of open source to make data work better for farmers, OEMs, retailers, and the entire agricultural industry. The effort includes Purdue experts from agricultural and biological engineering, statistics, agronomy and other areas, and the discipline base will expand in the future. One recently released OATS project was Trellis, a new open-source framework for electronically sharing produce audit data and other customer-required information. For more information on Trellis, see: http://trellisframework.org.

Initial OATS Center funding is provided by a grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. Some of the leading agribusiness and technology companies in the industry have also pledged support, including WinField United, Centricity, CNH and ADM. The OATS Center will be an integral part of Purdue’s newly announced Digital Agriculture Initiative, which seeks to improve agricultural processes through more efficient use of data.

“AgGateway has been a leader in this area with its ADAPT project,” Ault said. “We are grateful for the help and support it has contributed throughout this launch phase of the OATS Center.”