2018 ICPA AgGateway, PAC, SPADE, and ADAPT
- R. Andres Ferreyra (Unlicensed)
- Jim Wilson
Prompt from abstract: 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.
Write below (and feel free to draw from the Applegate et al. 2016 paper):
< JIM >
Through 2004, agriculture-industry electronic-connectivity standards were fragmented across industry sectors. A number of leaders in the industry determined that an organization should be established to address this issue and promote industry-wide electronic connectivity. So, in 2005, AgGateway was established. At the time, AgGateway supported seed, crop nutrition, crop protection, feed, and software service providers. AgGateway executed projects to automate supply chain management processes for seed and crop nutrition. Software service providers were engaged to implement standards support. Implementation of existing standards was favored over creating new ones. AgGateway membership grew from a handful of companies to over 200 by 2018.
In 2011, the biggest names in North American precision agriculture met in Des Moines, Iowa, United States to consider whether AgGateway's successful approach to supply chain standards and connectivity could be applied to field operations. They concluded that the approach could work well and set about establishing a Precision Agriculture Council within AgGateway. Shortly after establishment, the group began project planning for a multi-year phased project to develop field operations standards and launched SPADE1 in August 2012. A couple years later a sister project called PAIL was launched. PAIL focused on irrigation-related data and processes.
As SPADE1 moved to SPADE2, the project teams observed that myriad field-operations data formats were the primary connectivity issue facing growers. The team held a principle that it's not about the data format, but what you do with the data, that should drive competitive advantage. With that principle in mind, the team (with PAIL) began work on mapping out the scope, license, and processes for an open-source project to create a tool for enabling interoperability across various field-operations data formats. That tool is ADAPT.
< / JIM >