2018 November Newsletter

November  2018   Volume 12  Number 10



Annual Conference

Join Us in Austin Next Week!

By the AgGateway Conference Committee

It’s not too late to join us in Austin next week for what promises to be a great Annual Conference! We’ll explore traceability solutions, emerging technology, precision ag, supply chain management, and much more. 

A few highlights:

  • The Traceability Working Group kicks off the conference Monday morning (Nov. 12) at 8:00 am to discuss four primary focus areas and work plans moving forward – followed by business and technical traceability sessions during the conference.
  • Our General Conference speakers include:
  • Keynote speaker Stephanie Liska, CEO of Beck Ag
  • Norbert Schlingmann, General Manager of the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF)
  • Ted Kaouk, Chief Data Officer, U.S. Department of Agriculture
  • Vince Restucci, Director of Procurement & Business Technology at R.D. Offutt Company
  • This year catch our business track that includes "Who Touched Your Grub and Why You Should Care - The Business Value of Traceability" and "Putting the Business People in the Driver's Seat" on the Decision Modeling and Notation standard as a way for business experts to own, develop and test business process logic.

Read more >

AgGateway 2020

Planning for AgGateway 2020 to be Discussed at Annual Conference

At the Annual Business Meeting on Monday, Nov. 12 in Austin, Strategic Board Chairman Doug Farrington will outline some of the planning taking place to ensure that AgGateway is ready to address the dynamic needs of the industry during the transition to digital agriculture, and that we remain positioned as the “go-to” resource for industry collaboration and transformation. Read more  >


New Member

Welcome SMAG

By Evin Ellis, AGDATA

AgGateway welcomes SMAG, a software company with 190 employees spread over five sites in France and Belgium. SMAG provides agriculture professionals with two software packages for farm management and traceability of agricultural products: ATLAND, for French farms, and AGREO, for the French and foreign agricultural and agro-industrial sector. By combining the agronomic and IT skills and expertise of its engineers, SMAG supports innovation to meet technical, economic, regulatory and environmental management problems of professionals in the sector. Read more >


AgGateway Resources

Benefits of the AgGateway Inventory Reporting Flat File

By Donald Green, EDI Systems Analyst, Nutrien Ag Solutions

If you talk to retailers and small-to-medium distributors, the choices for inventory reporting in the past were to implement B2B integrations or to create dozens of custom spreadsheets each, with a format specific to the manufacturer or supplier. It takes considerable time to change the format and values being sent to each manufacturer’s specification. Some smaller manufacturers can’t implement XML at this time, so they either need to use a third party to receive reported inventory information, or they could use the flat-file format.

To solve this problem, retailers, distributors, manufacturers and software vendors across multiple AgGateway councils banded together to define a standard flat file format for inventory reporting. If you need to create inventory data manually, the standard includes a Microsoft Excel template, User Guide, and a Specification. For those with modest IT capabilities, your staff can easily implement software tooling to generate this one file format and satisfy the needs of dozens of manufacturers, suppliers and distributors. Read more >


Precision Ag

Rolling Out New Solutions in Precision Ag

By Jessica Trites Rolle, NCIS

The Precision Ag Council has released several new flyers to share with members at the AgGateway Annual Conference. These include:

  • The Observations & Measurements flyer describes the problem of capturing accurate quantitative and qualitative observations about processes in the agricultural value chain – a process that is critically important, but very difficult. Retaining the meaning of data shared with partners and even within organizations is particularly hard. Therefore, AgGateway developed an agricultural implementation of the ISO 19156 standard for observations and measurements. This is now ASABE / ANSI US National Standard S632-2. The system includes a central repository for definitions of data variables plus a simple process for adding entries.
Read more > 

AgGateway Resources

New Innovation Profiles

By AgGateway Communications Director Susan Ruland 

We wanted to shine a spotlight on some of the innovative ways AgGateway member companies use AgGateway resources – like the Ag Industry Identification System (AGIIS), ADAPT, AgGateway Standards, etc. – to create and improve their own proprietary products and services. After all, AgGateway’s mission is to advance the transition to digital agriculture – and that is achieved in large part through the adoption of these common standards. So to highlight some of the great ways AgGateway Standards are now used in agricultural solutions, we launched the Innovation Profile, a 2-sided color flyer that summarizes the application. Read more >

Member Services

Let Member Services Help you Plug In to Digital Agriculture!

By Chris Crutchfield, AgGateway Member Services

As a live music lover, I’m excited that this year’s AgGateway Annual Conference is being held in Austin – the capital city of Texas, and arguably the music capital of the United States. The city has more than 250 music venues and is home to festivals for all musical tastes. AgGateway’s conference theme, “Get Plugged In” pays homage to the city’s musical heritage while encouraging the ag industry to also “plug in” to reap the benefits of digital agriculture.

Member Services will be on stage again this year, performing, “Member Services Live!” to help you do just that. Okay, it’s not really a performance, but as in years past we will be available throughout the conference at a desk near registration, to provide personal assistance on everything from your membership, to helping you find available AgGateway resources, or to simply provide you directions to your next meeting. Read more >

AgGateway in the News

This month we saw media coverage of another AgGateway case study – this one with Growmark – in our series with Farm Journal Media. Thanks to the folks at Growmark for spreading the word about AgGateway Standards! Another recent article of interest features a dialogue with Purdue’s Dennis Buckmaster on the AEM website.

AgGateway Digital Ag In Action: Benefits Business and Co-Op Members

agprofessional.com, Oct 29, 2018 — Today, 65% of Growmark’s crop protection orders and 60% of the crop nutrient orders are sent using AgGateway standards and electronic connectivity. Click here to read the full case study. Growmark began automating business processes more than 10 years ago, and connectivity is now standard operating procedure at the company. New business partners are expected to be able to connect electronically. This article is part of AgGateway's case study series on digital agriculture, a partnership with Farm Journal Media.

Q&A: Digital Agriculture and the Future with Purdue University’s Dennis Buckmaster
Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) blog, October 29, 2018 — “There are standards efforts underway, in organizations like AEM, ISO, AgGateway, the Open Ag Data Alliance. But we do need to move these efforts faster than they’ve ever moved before, because the problems are outpacing our ability to solve them…. “when we need to make data, sensor systems and analytics work across companies, that really requires some collaboration that allows that company to consume the data that my equipment might be generating, as an example. And so just as the internet was built on open source technologies that allowed things to be compatible without too much effort, that’s what we need to do in agriculture. Instead of proprietary silos, we need to at least release APIs so we can have data exchanged—so that I’m not manually handling, in my email and on flash drives, countless files.”