2018 March Newsletter

March 2018   Volume 12  Number 2


  • Interested in Traceability? AgGateway is a forming a new Traceability Working Group. Look for more details here and in your in-box; to express interest, contact Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org or (+1) 866-251-8618. Participants must be AgGateway members.
  • New Mix Ticket Standard: AgGateway members are invited to a quickly moving effort to define a standard for mix tickets, also known as blend work orders, primarily used in fertilizer blending. A face-to-face meeting will be held March 13-15, hosted by Murray Equipment in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Contact AgGateway Standards Director Jim Wilson at Jim.Wilson@AgGateway.org or (+1) 816-516-8847.
  • New to AgGateway? Join us for a one-hour orientation webinar on April 22 for a background on the AgGateway organization and how to get involved in AgGateway. Register here. 
  • Mark Your Calendar! 
    2018 Mid-Year Meeting  June 11-14, Prairie Meadows in Altoona, Iowa
    2018 Annual Conference November 5-7, Sheraton Austin Hotel at The Capitol, Austin, Texas


New Member Profile

Welcome Nebraska Grain and Feed Association

By J Nolfo, BASF and Communications Committee Chair

AgGateway welcomes the Nebraska Grain and Feed Association (NeGFA), which represents and provides services to entities involved in grain, feed and related commercial businesses in the state of Nebraska. NeGFA has joined AgGateway’s Grain & Feed Council to stay abreast of issues impacting its members, and looks forward to being involved in the council’s meetings. Read more...

Leadership Profile

Leadership Profile: Natasha Lilly

By J Nolfo, BASF, and Communications Committee Chair

How long have you been involved with AgGateway, and what are your current activities with AgGateway?

I have been involved in AgGateway since 2014. I found it extremely easy to become active and get involved right away. For 2018, I am the Ag Retail Council Chair. We have some exciting projects starting up in that council. I am also a liaison for several of the councils.

Give us a quick synopsis of your career path – where did you start, and where are you now?

I started my career in 2011 as a software trainer for The Equity. We were in the middle of implementing a new ag software and I was hired to learn and train on this software. We found out shortly after implementation that our new software, Agvance (SSI), had a large presence in AgGateway and felt that it was very important to get involved. Today, I am the Information Services Director for The Equity.

Read more...


Precision Ag

Agriculture Impacts Weather: The Case for Connected Ecosystems

By Brent Shaw  VP of Weather Content and Customer Success, Iteris

Editor’s note: Brent Shaw, who is a member of AgGateway’s PAIL irrigation project, recently published a blog that may be of interest to AgGateway readers. Below are excerpts, and a link to the full blog, which ran last month in PrecisionAg magazine. Thanks for mentioning AgGateway, Brent!

It’s fascinating to see how modern technology has helped us increase our agricultural productivity in areas not otherwise suited for our higher value crops…. Most of us have experienced micrometeorological effects due to small scale variations of the landscape, but with the much larger areas of landscape modification, visible enough to be readily identified from space, I am reminded of research by scientists such as Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., postulating that landscape changes may be affecting climate regionally, perhaps much more significantly than any effect that atmospheric carbon dioxide content has had on a global scale. Read more...


Member Services

Plug Me In!

By Chris Crutchfield AgGateway Member Services

Trying to determine how your organization can get the most out of your AgGateway experience this year? If you’re just getting started, there are several questions that may cross your mind, such as “What projects are currently underway and how do I get involved?”, “Do any of my trading partners participate in AgGateway?”, “What is digital agriculture?” and “How do I get started?” One easy way to get the answers is to give us a call at AgGateway Member Services. Member Services is a one-stop, centralized resource for AgGateway members. We can provide answers to questions about membership, where to find AgGateway tools and resources, and questions about the projects that are either underway, on the horizon, or already completed. Read more...


Precision Ag

Ag Broadband Coalition Hails Precision Agriculture Connectivity Act

A recent article of interest

The Agricultural Broadband Coalition applauded bipartisan leaders in the House and Senate in January for introducing the Precision Agriculture Connectivity Act of 2018, legislation designed to facilitate the deployment of broadband internet across rural America — including ranchland and cropland, where broadband connectivity is increasingly essential for production agriculture. Read more...


Barcoding

Supply Chains’ Growing Need For Rugged Mobile Devices

By Jody Costa  Barcoding Inc.

Managing a supply chain in real time has become a necessity, and rugged mobile devices are becoming a much stronger presence thanks to their ability to help workers move goods through the supply chain. The operational visibility they provide can lead to better decision-making and more efficient order processing.

The devices used by truck drivers, retail store clerks, and the staff at warehouses must be configured properly so that those operating them can enter data easily without being held back by problems like temperature, truck vibration or drops from forklifts. Read more...


AgGateway In the News

By Susan Ruland  AgGateway Communications Director

More great coverage this month of the new ISO plugin and implementation of AgGateway’s ADAPT, grain traceability, new look-up capabilities for certified fertilizer facilities on AGIIS, and more.

Seamless Interoperability Between Farm Machines and Software is a Step Closer Press release, March 1, 2018 – 365FarmNet, Aarhus University, AGCO, AgroIntelli, CNH Industrial, GRIMME, Kverneland, and Wageningen University and Research are proud to announce important steps forward towards real interoperability between farm machines, sensors and software. Interoperability is a key issue in the advancement of digital farming….Using AgGateway’s ADAPT framework, the partners have demonstrated how data can be exchanged between agricultural equipment and software platforms from different brands in a standardized format. This is an important enabler for the flow of data required to make "digital farming" or "Agriculture 4.0" a success.

AgGateway Debuts ADAPT ISO Plugin Version 2.0 PrecisionAg, Feb 6, 2018 – AgGateway's ADAPT Framework, which is designed to make it easy for various hardware and software systems that growers use in their businesses to “talk to each other”, now has a new tool to help developers: the ADAPT ISO Plugin. AgGateway has released Version 2 of the ADAPT ISO Plugin.

AgGateway steps up efforts to track feed grains from farm to elevatorFeedNavigator.com, Jan 17, 2018 – AgGateway is a business association comprised of a group of agribusinesses involved in creating standards and implementation guidelines for the agriculture and feed industry. The group's focus is to support the sector in moving towards digital agriculture.

Automated Look-Up of ResponsibleAg-Certified Fertilizer Facilities agprofessional.com, Jan 29, 2018 – Certified ResponsibleAg locations are now included in AgGateway's Ag Industry Identification System (AGIIS), a database that houses agricultural reference data for industry subscribers. AGIIS is used widely by crop nutrition companies to provide location and product identifiers that allow for the automated exchange of data.

Agriculture Impacts Weather: The Case for Connected Ecosystems PrecisionAg, Feb 15, 2018 – …We can realize this goal over time as the world's different technologies continue to become more interconnected and groups like AgGateway continue to build data exchange standards. We need to recognize the hydrological cycle is also a local and regional issue.

John Deere Generation 4 CommandCenter Display No-Till Farmer, February 13, 2018 - John Deere's Generation 4 CommandCenter Displays and Ag Leader Technology SMS software are compatible via John Deere’s Ag Data Application Programming Toolkit (ADAPT) plug-in. AgGateway’s ADAPT is a software toolkit designed to eliminate the major pain points to broad use of precision agriculture data by easily enabling interoperability between different software and hardware applications.