Welcome to GOAT 2024! And welcome to the GOAT Forum!
We will be documenting the conference on this forum. You can see previous conference documentation for GOAT 2018 and GOAT 2022.
This is the 2024 attendee introduction thread. This year we’re including an option to include your favorite plant/ animal/ or farm themed joke. We just might milk this material at the conference.
Please Copy-Pasta this template into your response!
**Name:**
**Location:**
**Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology:**
**Joke**
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I’m an agricultural informatics research scholar. I am primarily a technologists, with experience of engaging in permaculture and organic community gardening in home, community, and university contexts. For the last 5 years I’ve focused on data stewardship in conservation agriculture.
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I believe that agriculture is a relationship between Earth and humanity, and that through open and appropriate technology we can continue to improve that relationship. I maintain farmOS, an open-source farm record keeping application, and I helped to organize the first GOAT conference in 2018.
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: Looking into how software engineering research can help support permaculture and regenerative agriculture. Food growing enthusiast and plant lover.
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I’m developing and deploying open-source sensors for use by small-acreage farmers to help them build healthy soil and effectively use limited water resources in arid environments. Professional background in renewable energy, student of regenerative agriculture.
Joke: What did the algae say to the fungi?
How are ya’ll lichen these rocks?
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I am currently in the beginning phase of a project called ADAPT which stands for “Advancing the Development of Agricultural Workers’ Proficiency with new Technologies.” The project is designed to prepare farmworkers for the technological advancements in agriculture by developing new training programs and resources. Part of this project includes surveying ag tech developers, farm operators/owners, and farmworkers. I am also interested in exploring worker safety around collaborative ag robots, worker data privacy, and anything ag tech! I am looking to learn more from everyone and there is so much I don’t know and I’m excited to explore that.
Bit of background: I grew up on a farm in Yuba City (peaches + animals), I formerly co-owned an organic farm in Davis “The Cloverleaf farm” which was an 8 acre organic farm, I worked for the cooperative extension with the Smalls Farms program, and I am now with the Western Center for Agricultural health and Safety.
Edit: I am also learning Python on my own. If anyone has any tips or resources…let me know!
Favorite Animal I raised goats growing up; my favorite farm animal is the goat. They are like puppies when they are kids and I enjoy watching them play king of the hill when they jump on things and push each other off. They are very loving and funny to watch.
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: co-Founder LiteFarm, Prof at Univ of British Columbia working on food and data sovereignty and agroecological transitions in various global contexts. Family farming background.
Joke Not sure if this is actually a joke but something that we need to work on: my brother in law (working our family farm) was wearing a t-shirt that said this last weekend:
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: Partnering with Open Food Network. Using our open source Data Search Engine to create a wholesale buyers to local food producers procurement tool
Favorite plant: My mango and atemoya trees at home
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I am a long-time open source enthusiast, tinkerer, casual GIS user, and aspiring systems thinker. In the last few years I have been participating in the farmOS development process and building compatible tooling as part of my current role as a co-maintainer of our nascient small community seed bank. I would like to help more people be hands-on with their own food production and I believe that open source hardware/software are key to egalitarian local food systems.
Joke:
I’m addicted to brake fluid… but at least I can stop whenever I want!
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I’ve always been passionate about the ethics of Open Source. I believe agriculture, as the fundamental activity that keeps us all alive, is the most important of them all to be kept open and accessible and auditable to everybody because it is the only way to make a healthy and enjoyable life possible to everybody.
I am a statistician and I work at OurSci with Greg, mostly doing data engineering that helps farmers and organization gather, process and analise their data in ways compatible with Open Source and Open Data ethos, as well as data analysis and model training based on the same activities. I do data pipelines, plots, models,briefs with huge p value tables and dashboards, basically.
My last two projects have been models predicting soil organic carbon content in several african and central american countries and work on agricultural data schematization.
Joke: A biologist, an mathematician and a statistician share a cabin in a train that’s crossing Patagonia when they see a black sheep, which 5 seconds later is left behind by the train.
The biologist points to the sheep and says “Look! Sheeps in Patagonia are black!”.
The mathematician looks at him with a snobby face and corrects them: “Given the evidence, you should say: ‘one black sheep exists in Patagonia’”.
The statistician answers: “The only thing we can say is that given Argentina, a sheep existed for at least five seconds, and at least one of its sides is black”.
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology:
I architect and scope technology through Our Sci and OpenTEAM mostly, and have relationships through our family farm in using ag tech (less open there).
Joke
Why was the astronaut surprised when she landed on the moon?
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology:
I manage Litefarm, an open-source farm management tool that helps farmers better organize their farm activities and supports research
Joke
What did the farmer say to the cows at night? It’s pasture bedtime!
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I work for MarketLink, a non profit organization that provides grant funding to cover the costs of app-based payment systems for food assistance benefit programs.
Name:
Marie (A.M.Tsaasan) Location:
The cultural wasteland between San Diego and Long Beach Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology:
Short version: Flirtatious.
Longer tale: I was lied to growing up. I was told that the reason there was unnecessary starvation was a lack of food. I’ve been sort of bitter about the exisiting systems decision-making process since then. Everyone should have access to revelant information for personal and group decision-making, and the idea of open-ag tech in these dark profit times is a bit subversive and dreamy sounding. I enjoying teaching intro cs and re-orienting the imaginations of enthusiastic learners, hoping to turn the grand fictions Hollywood and the media has promised them is possible, into long term goals of thoughtful, targeted soft/hardware designed to re-iterate as long as as it lives. I want to give my students (and those in the dept who want to use the no-cost text) a new set of problems to practice their for loops and methods writing and such. I want to create a set of course materials that inspires prosocial design thinking. My department is open to set in Java an Python, so I’m hoping part of my long-term relationship with open ag tech is that my future students will be better prepared than my current ones, to be positive contributors to our futures. Confession: I read Braiding Sweetgrass last year and am feeling hopeful, then I saw that Ankita and Juliet were GOATing and then Birgit and well… the most wonderful folks I met in that lab are doing this thing and I will try to refrain from fangirling too hard.
Relationship with Open Agriculture Technology: I’m a user experience designer for Tech Matters, currently working on the new LandPKS app (Land Potential Knowledge System) which puts soil science into the hands of people with all levels of soil and land management knowledge. Outputs from the app include soil and ecological site identification, available water holding capacity, land capability classification, and more. On the roadmap is vegetation monitoring and soil health monitoring tools.
Hurricane Helene Western North Carolina and southern Appalachia in general are suffering greatly in the aftermath of Helene. Please consider monetary donations to these organizations doing incredible work here: Beloved Asheville, Rural Organizing and Resilience, Hearts with Hands, World Central Kitchen, Grassroots Aid Partnership. <3
