Introduce yourself to OpenTEAM!

[JeffPiestrak]

Howdy all, my name is Jeff Piestrak and I’m more of an OpenTEAM stan than active participant at the moment. I’ve worked with Dorn in the past, including a “Northeast Food Knowledge Ecosystem” project that networked several non-profit Drupal sites together in support of dynamic data and information exchange and pooling.

I’m now looking to build on lessons from that experiment (including how difficult it can be to rely on non-profits to value and sustain complex ICT systems!), as well as those from my 20+ yrs of “Land Grant Informatics” work and research at Cornell’s Mann Library.

I’m interested in how our library might be a part of OpenTEAM and the “Ag Data Commons” envisioned by the USDA National Ag Library, shown below (from a presentation at Mann by NAL Director Paul Wester).

NAL uses the Drupal-based DKAN software for their own data hub. I’d like to develop a Cornell/NY DKAN node within this network, and OpenTEAM. One particular area of keen interest is agroecology and agroforestry (including silvopasturing). That includes support for “Farmer Research Networks” as a strategy for matching diverse options and contexts, as envisioned by Cornell faculty member Rebecca Nelson. I’d love to connect and work with OpenTEAM folks on this, even if just experimentally at first.

Cheers!

[plawrence]

Hi All!

Patrick Lawrence here saying hello from Bozeman, Montana. I am an ag consultant who works closely with the Sustainable Food Lab and Cool Farm Alliance among other university research partners. My background is in environmental modeling, vegetable seed production, dryland systems, soils, GIS and on-farm research.

I’m really excited to help get the data flowing and improve the quality and quantity of input data/models that are driving farm decision-making, especially related to soil carbon. In watching all of the recent webinars it has struck me as truly amazing how far things have come with world-wide data availability, APIs, and open source tools. And everything is about to get that much better!

See you tomorrow or Friday in Denver.

[jgaehring]

Hi, my name is Jamie Gaehring. I’m a frontend developer for farmOS, and the maintainer for farmOS Field Kit, which is an offline-first native app for Android and iOS, as well as a Progressive Web App.

I’m eager to trade notes with other OpenTEAM members regarding such topics as usability (specifically for farmers) and replicating data across distributed systems.

Recently I’ve become interested in the concept of “local-first” software, and would love to incorporate some of its principles into the design of Field Kit. Specifically I’m interested in using Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT) for the core data structures of system we’re calling Field Modules. The hope is that such a system could have, at its core, a library for synchronizing farm data in a common format that can be incorporated into other systems, which wish to interact with a farmOS server, or to host a standalone, locally-persisted database that complies with the farmOS data schema.

I look forward to learning and sharing with the rest of OpenTEAM, see you soon!

[rexraimond]

Hi, my name is Rex Raimond. I am an affiliate of Meridian Institute, which is a non-profit organization that creates and facilitates multi-stakeholder partnerships to solve difficult sustainability challenges. I work on policy and market interventions to help farmers adopt practices that improve soil health. Our partner Bob Adams (a human-centered design expert) and I will attend the OpenTEAM meeting.

We are interested in discussing a new project to create a “Soil Health Accelerator Community of Practice (CoP).” The idea for the CoP emerged from a meeting last year at TomKat Ranch and the recognition that there is a proliferation of efforts focused on developing soil health tools, technologies, and services, and that there is a need to better connect these efforts to programs aimed at creating more sustainable food systems.

We hope to create a CoP that would add value to existing initiatives and networks by intentionally engaging non-traditional partners and end-users (e.g., investors, entrepreneurs, supply chain companies, farmers, ranchers, and others) to enable the large-scale use of tools and technologies to improve soil health. Bob and I look forward to participating in the meeting and discussing our ideas - and getting your input - on the margins of the meeting.

[3wordchant]

Hi folks!

I’m Carl, lead developer of the Cool Farm Tool – a farmer-friendly agricultural sustainability calculator.

Apart from meeting everyone, my main interest this week is to work on data interchange standards, so that our efforts integrating particular tools with each other naturally build towards a shared technical platform.

Proposal for additional introductory question: worst farming joke? Mine:

A rancher asked me to help round up their 18 cows. “Sure”, I said, “that’s 20 cows”

[ziamehrabi]

Hi everyone!

I’m Zia. I lead LiteFarm, and am the lead for technology baselines for the CGIAR’s Platform on Big Data in Agriculture.

Look forward to connecting over the next couple of days to think about how we make adoption happen.

[Craig]

Hi everyone,

I’m here representing the Cool Farm Alliance.

I direct the Cool Farm Tool development at Anthesis and tend to do most of the UI design and functional specification (taking work from the methods committee and domain experts and interpret this within the CFT). I also sit on the CFT’s DevOps Committee.

Two cows were talking in the field one day.
First Cow: “Have you heard about the Mad Cow disease that’s going around?”
Second Cow: “Yeah, makes you glad you’re a penguin, doesn’t it?”

[maria.bowman]

Took me a bit to reply to this, but I finally made it on here!

I’m Maria, and I’m the Lead Scientist for the Soil Health Partnership of the National Corn Grower’s Association. My training is in ag. and natural resource econ, and I have a pretty diverse research background relating to ag, natural resources, and the environment. I’ve worked for USDA-ERS, NRDC, and the Woods Hole Research Center over the years, and am passionate about working with farmers to make conservation practices and management systems more feasible in the context of the modern agricultural landscape. I am always pushing to learn more about the impacts of these practices in different regions and farming systems, and developing technologies that serve this purpose is critical to help us measure and monitor economic and environmental outcomes. So excited to be a part of OpenTEAM!

[astronomyk]

Hi all,

My name’s Kieran, I’m a instrument scientist working at the department of astrophysics at the university of Vienna, Austria. I have a background in NIR spectroscopy, and have recently started trying to think up ways for the soil science community to leverage the decades worth of knowledge about spectroscopy locked up inside the astrophysics community.

I’m very interested in learning how this community currently uses NIR reflectance spectroscopy to measure soil parameters, and am more than happy to help out with new ways of applying astrophysical techniques to more efficiently, rapidly and cheaply quanitfy soil carbon.

I look forward to learning and sharing with everyone here in the community!

[gbathree]

I would love to have a discussion with you, what a fascinating adjacent space to have around! We make little handheld reflectometers (colorimeters in the UV VIS and very near NIR). We’re looking at creating an expanded wavelength range single spec (350 - 1700ish) that’s at a much lower price point. Would love to brainstorm with you. Would also bring some other folks into the conversation. Let me know if you want to set up a call!

[TomWatson]

Hey folks,

My name is Tom Watson, and I am a software developer looking to contribute to OpenTEAM in some fashion.

My career started in the Australian Geospatial Organization, doing remote sensing and geospatial analysis for the Australian intelligence community. I moved to the USA in 2014, joining Terravion, an AgTech company delivering aerial imagery (NDVI, color, thermal, etc etc) to the agricultural sector. I left them and joined HERE technology, an enterprise location company, in 2016. Been working with HERE on the analytics/management suite for our fleet of terrestrial imagery/LiDAR collection over these last few years.

I want to contribute more in the agriculture/land-use space and trying to find ways to do that. My focus has mainly been on geo data visualization, front-end web applications, and CRUD back-end web servers.

I am also a youth group leader for two nature-based rites of passage groups of unruly teens and love dancing.

[aislinnpearson]

Hello All,

My name is Aislinn (pronounced "Ash-lyn). Don’t worry - even my parents got it wrong at first. It’s a tough one, as most Gaelic ones are (and I’m not even Irish!)

I work at Rothamsted Research in the UK. My research specialism is insect disease and migration, but I think of myself as an agricultural ecologist and (as we all know) any ecologist worth their salt must learn to code and stats so… here I am.

I have two jobs at Rothamsted. I run a monitoring project for fall armyworm in Kenya, and with the other 50% of my time I co-ordinate our new agricultural systems trial. This is a HUGE trial, with 120 plots across two different sites, each plot measuring 24m x 24m.

We have a four-way factorial design: rotation x cultivation x crop protection x nutrition. This includes 3 rotations: a 3 year economic optimum (wheat-wheat-oilseed rape), a 5 year agronomic best practice (wheat - oilseed rape - spring cereal - wheat - spring legume) and a 7 year ecological optimum (wheat - spring cereal - 2 year grass ley - wheat - soybeans - linseed).

Each site has 60 plots - four replicates of each rotation, with all crops in the rotation planted every year. These four replicates of the full rotation are then planted on (1) zero tillage with standard pesticide treatments (2) zero tillage with IPM (3) full inversion with standard pesticides (4) full inversion with IPM.

Every plot is then divided in half to provide the nutrition treatment - one half gets compost/manure and cover crops plus micro-nutrient amendments, the other half is left fallow, does not get compost/manure and never gets macro but not micro-nutrients (unless there is an obvious deficiency). This gives us 24 farming systems in total.

We are working to measure as much as we can on every plot. This includes: managment data, economic data, sub-terranean pitfall traps and sticky line traps for insect diversity, annual assessments of soil microbial diversity, soil physical and chemical properties once every three years (although we’re still working on a protocol for plant available nutrients), soil carbon, gaseous emissions, yield, plant nutrients… everything basically. Or, at least, as much as we can afford to pay for.

Anyway, I’m here because the Rothamsted Farm use FarmOS to manage the management data on our research farm () and we have this amazing dataset that can contribute to the development of the “trunk” for FarmOS. I’m also keen to start linking some of Rothamsted’s models (here’s looking at you RothC) and developing useful applications/protocols that both our scientists and Rothamsted’s networked farms can use.

Phew. That was long. But now you know who I am, and if I have any data you’d like access to please just ask. I only work on this part time and so I can’t always respond to things as quickly as I’d like, but if you promise to be patient with me I’ll try get you whatever I can

Looking forward to working with you all! Some of you already have some amazing tools I’m looking forward to trying out.

Aislinn

[Blundgren]

Hi all! I’m Britt Lundgren, I lead Stonyfield’s work on organic and sustainable agriculture. If you’re not familiar with Stonyfield, we’re an organic yogurt company based in southern NH. My work focuses on both agricultural sustainability and government affairs.

I’m part of OpenTEAM’s secretariat and am leading the Hub Farm working group. I’m also working within Stonyfield to look at how we can use OpenTEAM with the farms that provide our milk and other ingredients.

My background is in both science and policy. I’ve been at Stonyfield for 9 years, prior to this I was working on agricultural policy (farm bill & climate) for Environmental Defense Fund in DC.

I’m really excited to see this community coming together and get started on bringing OpenTEAM to life!

[zweig716]

Hi all,

I’m Steve Rosenzweig, soil scientist at General Mills. I lead regenerative ag research and program development in our key sourcing regions to help meet our commitment to advance regenerative ag on 1 million acres by 2030 and our goal to reduce GHG emissions across our full value chain 28% by 2025.

Prior to joining GMI 2 years ago I did my PhD in Soil and Crop Sciences (with a little sociology mixed in) at Colorado State University.

The topics at the top of my mind today are:

• How can we measure soil carbon, GHGs, water quality so cheaply that we are able to run a viable ecosystem services market? I am heavily involved in the soil carbon research for ESMC
• How does regenerative agricultural management impact soil health, insect and bird biodiversity, and farmer economic resilience? GMI has an outcome-based definition of regenerative ag that requires us to be able to measure improvements in those key areas, so I’m working on technologies and methods for quantifying those outcomes cost-effectively at scale.
• How do we drive adoption of regenerative ag? Using social science to design more effective programs and better target investments in agricultural sustainability.

Looking forward to connecting with you all. It was great hosting the on-farm sampling methodologies working group at our HQ earlier this month. We’ll have to do it again sometime.

Steve

[sudokita]

I just realized I never introduced myself here!

I’m Ankita, assistant professor at Purdue University, and I run the Agricultural Informatics Lab. My research and development is in human-centered design, information modeling, and software engineering, for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems.

I’ll be working on developing human-centered design capacity for openTEAM members, designing and developing utilities like the Plant Data Service as well as farmer decision-making tools. I also work with the Precision Sustainable Ag team on Cover Crop Decision Support Tools and with the OATS team machinery data interoperability.

[philip]

Hi everyone. I’m Philip Sheldrake. I work with the AKASHA Foundation on the application of cryptonetworking “for good”, and pursue a PhD in Web Science at Southampton University in my spare time … more of a journey than a destination

I spoke recently with @dornawcox about FarmOS and OpenTEAM and GOAT, and about a project I’m leading, Open Farming, and he invited me to jump in here and introduce myself.

Open Farming replaces monopoly rights (intellectual property) exerted under legal code in agriculture with revenue share under software code. This has — we believe — lots of beneficial consequences, especially in terms of value flows, recognition of those fundamental resource implications that have been (mis)labelled externalities to date, and what the P2P Foundation refers to as cosmo-localization. It shares many of the characteristics of a platform co-operative.

I look forward to learning more about GOAT, to meeting many of you, and learning about your projects.

[TomWatson]

@philip ooo sounds really interesting. I’ve been getting more and more interested in land coops/collectives since listening to https://www.farmtotaber.com/ and learning about efforts such as Sylvanaqua farms https://www.sylvanaqua.com/

Looking forward to hearing more about it

[OliMadgett]

Hi Guys,

I’m Oli, a grape grower based in South Australia, and one of the founders of Platfarm We’re working to help growers carry out smarter work on their land, simply using their mobile phone.

We also organise AgTech Meetups to help bring farmers and other ag professionals together with developers and start-ups

We are keen to help make GOAT happen in Australia, as we really feel that something similar needs to be happening over here

[lpuro]

Hello everyone. I’m Leah and I am the new research coordinator at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and Environment in Freeport, Maine. I will be working closely with the different tools as one the OpenTEAM hubs. I have been working as an agricultural researcher and farmer for the last 9 years and am thrilled to be a part of this group. Looking forward to continue our work together.