2018 ICPA Paper

Modern farming requires increasing amounts of data exchange among hardware and software systems. Precision agriculture technologies were meant to enable growers to have information at their fingertips to keep accurate farm records (and calculate production costs), improve decision-making and promote efficiencies in crop management, enable greater traceability, and so forth. The attainment of these goals has been limited by the plethora of proprietary, incompatible data formats among equipment manufactures and farm management information systems (FMIS), along with a lack of common semantics (meaning) in the industry.

Proposed partial solutions exist; e.g., the ISO11783.10 standard XML format is well-known and respected, but it is machinery-specific and does not include business-process details needed by growers’ FMIS.

AgGateway is an industry consortium of 200+ companies in the agricultural industry. In 2013-14, its SPADE project explored the feasibility of the industry developing an open-source format conversion toolkit. This experience led to what is now its ADAPT Committee.

The ADAPT team created a common object model or "Application Data Model" (ADM), a super-set of field operations data models presented by participating companies. The goal: to replace the current, fragile situation, where FMIS must support multiple hardware data formats, and each machinery manufacturer has to interact with multiple software companies, with a single ADM integration mediated by a framework (initially built on .NET Framework 4.5) from which manufacturer-specific plug-ins convert to and from proprietary formats.

This enables the FMIS to read/write to a wide variety of systems with little incremental effort, using ADAPT as a form of a digital agriculture Rosetta stone.

A special emphasis was placed on developing a data-driven approach to managing geopolitical-context-dependent information, and on delivering shared meanings (semantic resources) through application programming interfaces (APIs). 

Licensing is an important consideration when seeking to promote the wide adoption of a software platform. The ADAPT Committee selected the well-known, and broadly accepted, open-source Eclipse Public License for the ADM, the conversion framework, and community plug-ins. The licensing model for proprietary plug-ins is different from that of the community-supported tools: each plug-in writer can choose whatever licensing and distribution model best fits their business model.

Several machinery manufacturers have already begun writing plug-ins for their hardware; their projects are at different stages of development.

There are currently two community-supported plug-ins: one to convert ISO ISO11783-10 XML files; and another to perform lossless serialization and de-serialization of ADM instances. The former serves as a template for machinery companies that use the ISOXML format to customize, and the latter enables FMIS-to-FMIS communication, a critically-important function that the industry has been lacking.

Future plans for community-supported plug-ins include one for the Precision Agriculture Irrigation Language (PAIL) format, and another for sustainability metrics.