Until now the lack of a generally used standard between the various proprietary systems hindered the adoption of precision farming solutions. Hopes were quite big but most expectations could not yet been fullfilled satisfactorily because of many emergent dysfunctions between systems of different manufacturers.
Targeting this communication between the different precision agriculture systems the new software toolkit ADAPT from AgGateway could raise precision farming to the next level and boost its evolution.
AgGateway is a non-profit consortium of businesses serving the agriculture industry that helps member companies improve their profitability and productivity by promoting, enabling and expanding eBusiness in agriculture and agriculture-related businesses. www.AgGateway.org
According to the latest press release from Susan Ruland, AgGateways communication director, ADAPT - which stands for Agricultural Data Application Programming Toolkit, will eliminate the major pain points to broad use of precision agriculture data by easily enabling interoperability between different software and hardware applications. AgGateway's ADAPT Committee is coordinating with software companies on plug-ins needed for ADAPT's adoption.
ADAPT is an open source project, allowing precision ag software providers globally to use the software and to contribute to its continued development, all with the goal of ensuring broad adoption. The toolkit has been developed over several years by a large, collaborative group of AgGateway members from a variety of manufacturer and agricultural software companies, who all recognized that the farmer and other agricultural users have a critical need to use data from multiple sources to improve decision processes. Once adopted, ADAPT will allow the user to move precision ag data between different software systems easily and simply. For example, ADAPT will enable farm information management applications to easily use precision ag data collected on vehicle displays (field computers).
Companies currently participating in the ADAPT Oversight Committee include Ag Connections, Ag Leader Technology, AGCO Corp, Agrian, CNH Industrial, Central Valley Ag Coop, CLAAS, Independent Data Management, John Deere, Land 'O Lakes, Inc., Monsanto, Premier Crop Systems, ProAg Management, Raven Industries, Software Solutions Integrated, SST Software, Syngenta, Topcon Precision Agriculture, Trimble Navigation and ZedX. Additional companies involved with ADAPT through their work in AgGateway's SPADE Project include AgIntegrated, BASF, Bayer CropScience, Texas A&M, Crop IMS, Digi-Star, DTN, F4F Agriculture, Farmobile, GROWMARK, Heartland Co-op, Insero, MapShots, OAGi, Praxidyn, Vita Plus, XS Inc, and Wysocki.
For more information go to www.ADAPTFramework.org to find a growing set of resources to help with implementation.
What do you think about the press release? Could the new toolkit be a breakthrough in the adoption of PF techniques? We would like to know your opinion about ADAPT.