2026.07.16 GOAT Community Call

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GOAT Community Call

Date: July 16, 2026
Time: 1pm PT, 4pm ET
Meeting Link: Google Meet meeting
Calendar: Calendar – GOAT

Agenda

1. Welcome (5 minutes)
   • introductions of newcomers
   • ongoing call for participation,
   • request for Newsletter content
   • Q&A
2. Community Announcements (5-10 minutes)
   • Tech Matters is happy to support organizations curious about or desiring to adopt the Better Deal for Data (bd4d.org); reach out to [email protected]
   • Conference Organizing Update
   • AI in Ag call is tomorrow at 2ET.
   • Add your items here - this post is a wiki!
   • Greg is going to ASA Research Symposium at State College July 21-23 and will network regarding GOAT organizations. Deets below!
3. Community Speaker(s)
   • @gbathree’s trip to Ag Gateway - (10 minutes)
   • TBD - Share out about D-Web? (30 minutes)

Notes:
ASA COnference notes:

On-Farm Research Workshop: Tentative Schedule Update

• Optional Tour on Tuesday, July 21. (RSVP Required)

  Tour Schedule

  • Stop 1: Penn State Ag Research Site near Rock Springs
    Time: 1:00–2:00 PM
    Location: 1494 W. Pine Grove Rd., PA Furnace, PA 16865
    Lead: John Wallace, Penn State
    Topic: Field-scale lysimeters at the research site
  • Stop 2: DIFM.farm Platform Demonstration
    Time: 2:30–5:30 PM
    Location: Ag Progress Days Facilities, 2710 W. Pine Grove Rd., Pennsylvania Furnace, PA 16865
    Lead: David Bullock
    Topic: Organizing on-farm research trials through the DIFM platform

Table of Contents

Instructions

Click a session in the Table of Contents to jump to the session description and key questions.

Day 1: Wednesday, July 22

7:30 – 8:30 AM - Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:30 – 9:30 AM - Workshop Welcome & On-Farm Decision Making Discussion

• Workshop Welcome: objectives and expected outcomes reviewed briefly by facilitator

• Group/Open discussion:

  What Farmers Actually Consider When Making Decisions

  CEU: 1.0 Crop Management

  Description: Research recommendations are typically built on stable price assumptions and predictable conditions, but farmers make nutrient, timing, and input decisions under volatile markets, fluctuating fertilizer costs, labor constraints, and logistical realities that economic models rarely capture. This session examines the gap between ex-post research results and the ex-ante decision-making environment farmers actually face, where the numbers that looked good at the end of the season didn’t exist at the beginning. Attendees will explore how trial design and extension communication can better account for real-world risk, and what it takes to make a research recommendation that farmers can actually act on.

  Key Questions:

  • How do fertilizer timing windows, grain pricing uncertainty, and input cost volatility shape nutrient management decisions long before agronomic results are known?
  • What operational and financial risks do farmers weigh when deciding whether a trial is worth doing—and how can researchers and advisors design participation to match that risk calculus?
  • How can the field close the gap between economic theory and real-world decision-making to produce recommendations that remain credible under uncertainty?

  Discussion leaders:

  • Laura Kaminsky, PhD, PASA Sustainable Agriculture
  • Katie Kutscher, Heads Up Plant Protectants
  • Daniela Carrijo, PhD, Penn State
  • Quirine Ketterings, PhD, Cornell University
  • David Bullock, PhD, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

9:30 – 9:45 AM - Coffee Break

**9:45 – 10:30 AM - From Data to Decisions:

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Ag Gateway Midway Meeting:

Industry collaborative in the Ag Tech Space. Focused on finding opportunities for their members to collaborate, even if they are competing with each other. Mostly Ag Tech providers, and people who use Ag Tech:
Example Members: Grow Mark (A co-op of co-ops. Chemical and Seed sales all over the US). Syngenta, and OpenTEAM also.

Mid year meeting was at a horse racing track in Altoona, Iowa.

Greg presented: GOAT and the Standards Group (Better Deal 4 Data, Common Farm Convention, and Data Food Consortium)

The Ag Gateway membership didn’t know anything about us. There are some places our standards could be useful, but overall we have fundamentally different goals, so thos oppoerutnities were limited.

Ag in AI panel: Greg, CTO of Grow Mark, and a guy from Peroxidine (a tool for chemical mixing)

• The all talked about their experiences, working directly with farmers to generate visualizations from their csv’s. etc. E.g., the course he worked on with OFN.
• Its interesting how much power individual people can have when they start using these AI tools. And Ag Gateway’s members are not opensource advocates, instead AI can upset the SAAS business model, obviates products they’re trying to sell, and creates competition.
• Grow Mark has a huge amount of producer data on what worked and what didn’t regarding where to plan seeds, and they’re providing that data to consultants and providers (e.g., extension) and Greg saw really powerful potential with what they’re testing.
• Orgs are slow and careful to roll out because they have a reputation and they want to preserve it.

Lessons:

Discussion:
Steve has also engaged in several working groups.
GOAT should be a member.
Opportunity for members to shape direction within Ag Gateway -
GOAT 2026 ideas?

• A session of “What should we work on next?”
• How do farm bureaus work? If you show up and raise your hand, that would be great.
• Jim took a 20 pg detailed requirements doc for a standard, that he had to walk thru with end users who are not technical, and went through it line by line by line.
  • this created rich discussion about trust of data and that impacted the requirements

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D-Web - 1.5 hour outside of Berlin.

half day start up, 3 full days, half day shut down.
Camping! If you don’t have access to things, you can rent glamping materials. 14 ft across with a center pole in the center, and elevated cots, douvet, and pillow.
Bathrooms were all outside, compost toilets and showers.

Different cultural norms regarding clothing in bathing spaces created conflict.
Involved volunteer work: Digging ditches, pole barns, AV equipment, dishes…

Relevance to GOAT:
5-6 venues and tracks within the venues.
joy of missing out - 500 people, six tracks, you can’t possible experience everything together.
D-food web track had a tent. There was wall to wall programming in the tent.
Steve spent all most all his tent in the D-food web
Dorn did a lot of presenting across many tracks, so spent less time in food track
usually about 20 people in each session, sometimes as little as 10, sometimes as many as 30.

Most of sessions had world-wide context. All pursuing support for community food efforts, with a tech focus. Most presentations was about the work people were doing.

A lot of people didn’t consider themselves technical, but instead scientists, organizers, and social scientists. Most sessions were not about how we write software better. There was an how do we us AI session.

AI increases productivity, but

• it makes me unhappy with how I work
• environment impacts
• gives big tech the advantage

Takeaways:

• We need to be doing more sharing, better coordination, etc.
• If there is a spectrum between context is critical, ever project needs to develop software with their users in theri context.
• if we all work together we can build a flexible platform for multipel contexts
• we need to create technological components that can be easily reused in local contexts.
• we need to make time to help each other more. A lot of projects and day-to-day is supporting their users. But we should be helping our peers across the goal with our unique context - what can others learn from us that can help them move forward.

Another tent was Focus on sovereignty tech stack, so not food specific, but still relevant.

Dweb has a challenge in that its history is significantly CA based, so global solidarity is its current trajectory and this conference was a successful step in a broader, more global context.