In preparation for the 2022 conference - let’s get to know each other!
Respond to the following points:
Who you are (e.g., preferred name, pronouns, affiliations, role within the GOAT community)
What you do (professionally, in the Open Source world, in the Agriculture world, and in the world generally)
What projects you work on,
What skills/tools/resources you can bring to GOAT,
Why openness in ag is important to you.
I’ll get the ball rolling -->
I’m Juliet Norton (she/her). I’m an agricultural informatics project manager (primary) and researcher (secondary) in the Agricultural Informatics Lab at Purdue University. This lab is managed and motivated by @sudokita. I live in Martinez, California. I’m a practicing steward of the land, water, and air in the ways that I can given my sort of access to and relationship with these resources. Finally, I am active in my local community as a citizen, a woman, an environmentalist, and a parent.
Professionally, I support the agricultural sector with the design of open source technology grounded in the needs of resilient food systems.
In the last three years, a large portion of my work has been working with the national cover crop councils in the design of their decision support tools. I have also been active in our lab’s ongoing design and development of a Plant Data Service API and dashboard for crop data, cover crop data, and more.
Our research lab has been working on an open source handbook for research products in effort to give them legs as open source tools adopted and maintained by a broader public. On behalf of our lab, I hope to pilot this handbook with GOAT attendees.
I value intellectual sovereignty and technological self-determinism, and I find the open source technology paradigm is well suited to support these values. The success of open source technology is driven first by its effectiveness to support meaningful work and experiences rather than exponential profits. I assert that those who produce agri-food product are under compensated and under resourced. In an ideal world, for me, there should be no room for technology designed to accumulate already limited financial rewards in the hand of technology makers at the expense of farm workers. Instead, I believe we need to be developing tools that increase the financial, food, and ecological productivity of small and medium sized farms. In summary, I believe open source technology is well suited to support the people who care about and work tirelessly for our global and community food systems.
I’m a member / owner of Our Sci LLC, we make surveystack.io, soilstack.io, and a handheld reflectometer that’s used by some folks including the BFA.
I work a lot with OpenTEAM (openteam.community), Bionutrient Food Association (bionutrient.org) collaborate a lot with FarmOS and folks (farmos.org), starting to work with USDA folks. Always looking for communities interested in working together to ask big questions about the world.
I’m a JS monkey, so can do some JS scripts, can help people use surveystack.io, design good surveys, do some UI / UX, design experiments, think about open source business models, make 3D models… in short I do lots of stuff mediocrely (sp?), just ask!
Because openness is important to me and because, as Kita says… “how do we get to the Star Trek future we deserve”? Answer… not by government enforced policies that disincentivize the basic human instinct to share and appreciate what is shared with us. We get there by creating a positive environment where we can collaborate and work together on our common problems.
My name is Kevin Cussen (he / him) and I’m new to the GOAT community
I’m the product manager at LiteFarm, an amateur gardener, and long time open source supporter
LiteFarm and related ecosystems / communities
What @gbathree said - I do a lot of things decently and I know people that do some things really well
Because transparency in what we grow, how we grow it, and what we put in our bodies is important. Systems built on information asymmetry and exploitation tend to be really good for the few and really bad for most and oftentimes end messily for all involved.
Greetings GOAT folk! Very much looking forward to (re)connecting and perhaps scheming with some of you in October.
I’m Jeff Piestrak (he/him). Though I haven’t as yet been directly involved with the GOAT community much, I’ve been a fan and follower of the work it and its members do for years.
For the past 25 years I worked at Cornell University’s ag and life sciences library, Mann Library. I wore many different hats there in support of our Land Grant “knowledge with a public purpose” mission. That encompassed a variety of activities supporting the research, learning, and extension needs of our on and off campus communities, including our Cornell AgriTech ag experiment station, Cooperative Extension, and New York State residents. I’ve also been involved in several different community and regionally-based food systems initiatives. That includes a collaborative project with Dorn Cox/Farm Hack and others piloting a networked “Food Knowledge Ecosystem” in the Northeast US (which Dorn writes about in his dissertation ).
I recently retired from Mann Library and am now focused on helping cultivate and support regenerative agrifood systems which are “scaffolded” in some way by open technologies, and part of larger community and solidarity economy outcomes. This work is informed by my work at Cornell as well as my many years of front-line food systems work, from farm, orchard, and sea to plate. I also have a master’s degree in Community and Economic Development, with a concentration in Social and Community Informatics.
At home, my wife and I tend to a productive garden on our 5 acre hilltop homestead, directly adjacent to an 11,000 acre wildlife management area. I have a small nursery there where I grow native trees and shrubs. I’m using those to gradually replace invasives on our land, which we share with a wide variety of feathered, furred, and aquatic friends. I have a keen interest in agroforestry more broadly, and have started working with a friend who operates a forest farm nearby, and is an agroforestry expert with the Cornell Small Farms program.
In addition to the previously mentioned activities, I’m currently working with Prosocial World on helping cultivate the Prosocial Commons, a community of practitioners using the hylo.com platform (amongst other tools). Prosocial is a transdisciplinary approach (based in part on the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom) helping groups and groups of groups work together more effectively in support of shared values and goals.
I’ve also been working with the Cooperative Development Institute, exploring ways to survey, map, and assess solidarity food networks in New York State, using tools like sumApp and Kumu.io. I’m a former board member of the CDI affiliated Data Commons Coop.
Much of my past work has focused on what might be described as outreach and engagement, network weaving, boundary spanning, and coordinating. But I also have a set of specialized skills related to digital collection development, research support, data management, GIS, WealthWorks “value chain coordination”, and Prosocial facilitation.
Open approaches (tech, software, standards, etc) can enable greater access, interoperability, and innovation. Theoretically this can result in a greater number and diversity of people and orgs contributing to and benefitting from this work. But I’ve come to understand that open in itself is not enough – we must pay attention to who is able to a) recognize the potential “affordances” those tools offer, then b) have the resources to put them to “effective use”.
If we’re not careful, open resources can be unfairly exploited, e.g., by free riders and co-opters, worsening existing equity issues. Ensuring resources and services are not only open but FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, can help remedy this problem. Fair ownership and governance are also important, which is why some are calling for commons-based approaches in order to avoid what Nathan Schneider calls The Tyranny of Openness. That’s one reason why I’ve been drawn to the work of Elinor Ostrom, and more recent efforts by Prosocial World to “generalize the core design principles” of commoning she and her students identified. I hope to explore these issues and opportunities with others at the GOAT 2022 gathering, informally and possibly through an interactive workshop.
Nat Irwin (he / him or they / them) – I have followed the GOAT Forum for a couple of years, but I have yet to go to an event!
I’m the tech ecosystem facilitator at OpenTEAM. I previously worked at Our-Sci, where I became a big supporter of open source hardware and software.
I work with a lot of developers in OpenTEAM’s open source ag tech ecosystem (Our-Sci, FarmOS, LiteFarm, Terran Collective, etc.), and I also get to work with farmers who are using developing tech through our farm hub network.
Because I work as a facilitator between developers and farmers, I can bring a little bit of each perspective. I also really enjoy setting up public documentation and project management systems with tools like GitLab.
There’s a trust issue in the ag tech space due to the history of farmer exploitation. I think open source tools are a way to build trust, as well as a way to encourage resource and knowledge sharing within the agricultural sector.
Sienna Zuco (she/her), I am new to the GOAT community but have been working in this open ag tech space since this August of last year with OpenTEAM!
I serve as the Communications and Membership Coordinator at OpenTEAM (Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management), an initative of Wolfe’s Neck Center! This means I take a lot of what might be considered confusing or complicated and distill it down into easier to understand concepts for various audiences, from farmers and ranchers to the average joe! I find this work extremely important in communicating the larger goals of our community, what it means to collaboratively create open source technologies, and how it can benefit all of us. I also support our engagement processes where I introduce folks to our community, get them connected, and work with them on where they can fit in if they choose to support our work.
I work on our larger comms and report outs to keep folks updated on the work OpenTEAM and our larger community is doing, expanding our engagement, and both leading and supporting our visual storytelling/graphics design/visual style guide development work (from iconography to distilling larger concepts into more visual pieces).
I hope to bring my communications background, graphic design and creativity, and general audience knowledge to relay all the work this awesome community is doing in open source, ag tech, data/digital sovereignty and control, etc… in a multitude of ways while supporting various communications/organizational needs for different workshops and projects.
Being open in ag means being collaborative, willing to share, and building community. I think openness is the foundation to agriculture and agricultural communities, GOAT extends this into the technologies and research farmers are using and conducting for the larger sharing of knowledge and collective growth towards a better, stronger, and more connected food system.
and I’m on the science team at Regen Network Development.
These days I am spending much of my time developing alternatives to carbon credits to support earth stewards working toward ecosystem regeneration. I’m also working to develop a decentralized science (DeSci) community to support ecosystem regeneration research and outreach.
In addition to providing incentives for ecosystem regeneration practices, especially for agriculture, I have nearly 40 years of experience in remote sensing and geospatial data acquisition, analysis and modeling. I also tinker with electronics.
Openness is the lowest friction path to knowledge sharing and progress.
I am a part-time nerd at the University of California Merced. I manage my family’s farm. I dream about autonomous vehicles.
I have a new (stealth) startup developing ag. equipment.
I bring experience deploying driverless tractors at scale for corn/soybeans.
Ever since MS OS/2, I’ve sought control over my tools. I pushed that aside for 5 years while farming by JD’s recipe. Now I want to bring F/OSS to farm equipment so that farmers will regain control over their tools.
Hi everyone, my name is Mikah Pinegar (He/Him) and this will be my first GOAT! I’m excited to meet you all.
I work with Precision Sustainable Ag as a full stack developer. We work on developing cover crop decision support tools for farmers and researchers.
I mostly work a lot with React, Python, and Azure cloud services but I have worked on a lot of other projects as well. Some of the bigger ones are a Kobo Forms parser that regularizes forms filled out by farmers and pushes it into a database, a dashboard for farmers to view sensor readings from their farms, and multiple cover crop decision support tools.
I’m most familiar with Cloud architecture, web development, data processing, embedded systems programming (raspberry pi, arduino), making APIs, and automation.
Because openness creates good technology and I believe people should have a right to work on the tools they use. Not only for software but vehicles and equipment as well. In order to get the best product it’s often helpful to have unexpected contributors.
I’m from Regen Farmers Mutual – a farmer-owned environmental markets advisor/broker out of Australia. Our mission is to help farmers create value from their environmental assets – through productivity gains, environmental markets and green provenance. My primary role is as Managing Director of Regen Digital - the platform that mutual members use to manage their farm digital twins (AgData wallets). This is their data store that they use to prove environmental claims.
The digital twin platform was launched in Jun22. It is built on FarmOS and we’re developing integrations with SurveyStack, Hylo, and other services (for data collection, analysis and certification).
I have a financial markets background (traded FX in New York in the 90’s…) but have more recently been involved in startups and platform coops. I’ve worked in conservation finance particularly around environmental markets. My side hustle is as co-founder of https://wayfairer.coop - a regenerative tourism platform.
Transparency and openness are fundamental to creating alignment and trust. As a mutual, we embrace openness as a way to address market failures in carbon and biodiversity markets. Check out our 10 Principles that we co-designed with farmers (https://regenfarmersmutual.com/members)
Hi all, a bit later than some but I’m excited to introduce myself! I’m Courtney King (she/her), and am a Soil Health Analyst for the Soil Health Division of NRCS. This is my first exposure to GOAT, which I learned of through discussions and collaborating with folks involved in OpenTEAM, Our-Sci, FarmOS, etc.
As noted above, I am a Soil Health Analyst for the NRCS, a position I began in January 2022. Since then, I’ve been enjoying learning more about soil science and delve a bit into data analysis and visualization. One of my primary roles has been to oversee/provide feedback regarding the development of a platform to store soil health-related data and other information relevant to agricultural operations. I’m new to the Open Source world, and it has been interesting to discuss how a government agency with certain limitations can nonetheless move towards concepts like voluntary data portability.
My background is in ecology and public lands management, occasionally associated with agriculture. I greatly enjoy field work, but also thinking about how field-collected and remotely-sensed data can be integrated to improve analyses and modeling. I also quite enjoy geospatial analysis and map making, and thinking about how maps and other visualizations can be utilized in scientific storytelling.
Previously, I had the opportunity to coordinate a local grassroots organization in western CO that brought land managers, researchers, recreationists, stockgrowers, and others together to focus on the conservation of sagebrush ecosystems. I think back fondly on that time, and that organization as a unique example of various groups within the community joining forces and engaging in productive work and conversation surrounding species/issues that can be quite contentious. I care a great deal about my local community and natural spaces, so after some time away thru-hiking and traveling, have enjoyed returning and spending time recreating in the area while also trying to give back.
I’m not a developer myself, but have informed the design of a platform called PODS, the Producer Operations Data System, originally intended for the storage of data collected in soil health demonstration trials. It’s been exciting to see how PODS has gained lots of attention, and to work alongside others in thinking about how it could be used to store additional data meeting others’ needs, how I will analyze and produce useful maps and other products from those data down the line, etc.
I have some relevant skills including data management and analysis, as well as coordination and communication, but also think a lot of my experience at GOAT will be listening and learning from others who are much more experienced in these areas. I’m excited to engage in discussions about how NRCS can better meet producer and other stakeholder needs, learn what others are working on, and try to collaborate where possible!
Openness in ag (and in general) is very important to me because I think individuals and organizations have spent numerous hours (really, decades), resources, and become personally invested in collecting data that may ultimately reach very few others. I want to ensure that the great amount of effort invested in research is realized in that the approaches used, raw data collected, and results discovered find a larger audience and ultimately can be better used in aiding agriculturists and others in achieving their goals and ultimately acting as stewards of the land. I also think it’s important to consider how some information can be shared whereas other data should be protected, particularly in reference to past harms carried out by governments and the scientific community.
Hi, my name is Chris Rowe and I use he/him pronouns. I have been the Data Team Lead for https://resourcewatch.org/ since February of this year. It is an open platform for geospatial data which is part of https://www.wri.org/data/data-lab
I helped organize and attended GOAT 2018 and I have been working with open source software since at least 2005. I like to think about the big picture and come up with creative solutions. I am also and open source hacker with an interest in IOT Raspberry Pie data logging with sensors, Drupal, and data analysis with R and Python.
At WRI I have been working on a new tool to help agricultural supply chain stakeholders to think about climate change adaptation as part of their long term strategy. It would be really helpful to share with the GOAT community and get feedback on the usefulness of the platform we have build as well as ideas for future development and possible collaborations or integrations with other tools. https://www.agriadapt.org/
I am coming to GOAT to connect with like minded folks working in Ag tech, shared ideas, be inspired and form collaborations.
I’m a co-founder of Our Sci along with Greg Austic. Our Sci developed SurveyStack, SoilStack, and a low-cost reflectometer that has been used to estimate soil carbon and nutrient density. We are also wrapping up the MVP of the Farmers CoffeeShop.
I have been leading development of SoilStack, and open-source platform for soil stratification and in-field sample collection, supported by ESMC, OpenTEAM and CarboFarm (in Hungary). I am advising on collaborations with MSU to use the reflectometer to drive agronomic recommendations and track changes is soil health in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. I also manage the Bionutrient Instiute (a project of the BFA) activities, especially the data pipeline to get farm management and lab outcome data into the Farmers CoffeeShop.
I can’t code for shit…but I have spent a lot of time serving as the link between users (farmers, soil samplers, in-field researchers) and the developers of tools like SurveyStack, SoilStack and PhotosynQ. I can help develop projects and get them off the ground.
Trust and transparency!!! Working together to solve our common problems.
JT Wood (Jennifer Wood) (she/her), soil scientist/soil health specialist, currently with OpenTEAM Pilot Hub CA Association of Resource Conservation Districts, formerly an NRCS soil mapper and soil data quality specialist.
Certified as an NRCS TSP for Soil Health Management Plans
Project manager for the CA Farm Demonstration Network WordPress site that can take exports from Survey Stack to populate demonstration farm profiles, and also offer onboarded producers access to OpenTEAM tools.
I am exploring the use of Hylo to organize cross-entity workgroups.
My favorite thing to do is to connect people into larger networks and visualizing networks and systems. I am interested in how we can activate self-organizing systems and in using the model of a well-functioning soil food web as we rebuild the foundations of agriculture to be more life-centered.
The open ag technology principles accord with my aspirations towards a humanity that recognizes our fundamental interconnectedness in balance with our freedom of expression as individuals.
I am Amber Subers (she/her) and this is my first exposure to GOAT and I am new to the Open Source community.
I am a Project Coordinator for Our Sci. I have previous experience in software, grocery, HR, training, nutrition, leadership and project management. I am also a health and yoga enthusiast and all-the-time mom.
I am currently working on the Needs Assessment for the USDA PODS project as well as assisting with the data flow between FarmOS and the Farmers Coffee Shop and supporting the OpenTeam Fellows program.
I love taking an idea and turning it in to an actionable project with clear roles, objectives and timelines.
I am still learning about Open Ag Tech and the bigger picture for this initiative but in general I agree with the concept that we should create quality products and work collaboratively as a community to build things that will last.
I am Mike Stenta (he/him) of farmOS / Farmier. I helped organize GOAT in 2018.
I have been working on open source agricultural record keeping tools (primarily farmOS) since about 2013. I’ve been a Drupal developer since 2007, and more generally a web developer since 1997.
I maintain farmOS, an open source farm management and record keeping application and help to manage the farmOS community.
I know web development pretty well. And I’ve been thinking about how to model farm activities in software for a while. Probably other stuff - happy to contribute wherever I can!
Code and ideas in general are non-rival goods! Let’s collaborate instead of reinventing all the wheels! I also highly value data sovereignty.
Aaron Kingsbury (he/his, Associate Professor at Maine Maritime Academy and Research Affiliate at the Agriculture and Forestry Research & Development Centre for Mountainous Regions (Vietnam), I am new to GOAT.
College teacher, horticulturalist, geographer, open geospatial technologies (including RS and UAVs)
I conduct research in sustainable and indigenous farming practices in a number of countries.
I welcome ideas and technologies others wish to try in SE Asia and/or Maine.
I am Shreya Agarwal. I’m a developmental professional working in the space of ICT4D with a focus on bringing technologies that empower small holder farmers in Asia and Africa. I am a woman (she/ her) and a digital nomad heading to India for 2 months
I am Director of Strategy at Digital Green, a non-profit organization that develops and promotes the use of open south technologies to empower farmer groups.
I work on supporting FarmStack, a data sharing protocol, that helps organizations share data on their own terms in a secure manner that protects the privacy of clients, in this case small scale producers. I also support the development of products like a data wallet and a consent manager.
I’d be happy to share our learnings of developing and scaling farmer-first, open source protocols and tools for privacy-focused ag data sharing in the global south
In the rest of our lives we have given up our data to the walled gardens of big corporates. I believe we have an opportunity to reinvent the paradigm for farmers by creating systems that support farmers to own and control their own data so that they can unlock value.
I’m Kyle Birchard (he), with Integrative Economics, LLC and Resight Laboratories, Inc. in Portland, Oregon. I have been hatching ideas with people in the GOAT community over the past few years.
My connections are largely on the agriculture side. I work with growers, shippers, and industry organizations on special projects and studies related to information management and resource planning.
I am working on a few things, depending on the day:
A knowledge management platform for specialty crops with the California Cherry Board
A proof-of-concept for pollinator habitat enhancement collaboratives and ecocredits, with support from Regen Network
Open Sensory, an effort to develop open source software for the interoperability of agroecological data and models
And finally, Resight Laboratories, building remote sensing hardware to directly observe pollinator, pest, and beneficial insect activity in agricultural landscapes.
I have experience with basic electronics prototyping (Arduino/Teensy and board assembly), user-centered design interviewing, project management, and ag/enviro policy arcana.
I’ve come to support openness in agriculture based on my observations that IP practices in the seed and equipment industries have harmed growers and served to accumulate power in the hands of a rent-seeking class of businesses. Openness - in terms of data and knowledge - can contribute to a broader based kind of prosperity.
