ICPA 2016 - ADAPT

Modern farming requires increasingly precise and integrated operations such as field/crop scouting, crop planning, seed selection, planting, irrigation, fertilization and harvest.  The success of those operations is heavily reliant upon communication between the grower and various other industry members.  For each of these operations, information is being generated.  With production demands and operational costs increasing, the need for traceability, ease of data collection, accessible historical information, and a standardized format across all parties is becoming essential in allowing growers, consultants and other industry members to manage their operations at more granular levels.

Current precision technologies allow growers to configure machines for more efficient planting, fertilization and harvest, enable biotech and chemical manufacturers and dealers to improve their products and better understand their customer needs.  Interoperability has been a formidable hurdle to the use of precision ag technologies.

Improving the exchange of information between the necessary devices and instruments, pieces of equipment, data sources and Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) reduces growers’ efforts, helping to increase the wide-spread adoption of more precise farming practices and long-term profitability.  A standardized communication method between inputs for the relevant systems, users and control devices is needed to maximize the utility, application and desired outcome of advanced, precision irrigation methods and applications.

The Agricultural Data Application Programming Toolkit (ADAPT) aims to provide a means of seamless communication between different precision agriculture systems—regardless of the system manufacturer.  ADAPT provides a standardized means of collecting and consuming information to extract the most value from the data for each parties needs.  In turn, eliminating the major pain points to broad use of precision agriculture data.

The ADAPT project is a vital step towards streamlined agricultural communication; however, without a resource for users to access this toolkit and the standardized formats referenced, the adoption of the project is limited.  In creating the ADAPT documentation, we hope to provide the necessary information for users with varying backgrounds to put the toolkit to use.