Linux Foundation launched AgStand, an open source project for agriculture, to realize the intelligence of agricultural information.

The AgStand Foundation will establish and maintain a global food and agriculture data infrastructure to help digitally transform climate change, rural participation and food and water security.

May 5th, 2021, Calif. San FRANCISCO-the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that enables large-scale innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the AgStoundation Foundation, an open source digital infrastructure project for the world's agricultural ecosystems. The AgStand Foundation will improve global agricultural efficiency by creating, maintaining and enhancing free, reusable, open and specialized data and application infrastructure.

Founding members and contributors include leaders from the science and technology and agricultural industries as well as across sectors and regions. Members and partners include Agronomy, Code requirements, Global Center, Digital Green, Farm Foundation, FARMOS, HPE, IBM, mixed Bowl and better Food companies, NIAB, OpenStand, our SCI, Agricultural Marketing Association, Purdue University / Oat and Agricultural Information Lab, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC-ANR) and University of California Santa Barbara Smart Farm program.

"the global agro-ecosystem is in urgent need of digital transformation. There is too much loss of productivity and innovation due to the lack of reusable tools and data. I am pleased to lead this community of leaders, contributors and members from different industries and countries to help build this common and reusable resource, AgStack, which will help every stakeholder in global agriculture with free and open digital tools and data, "said Sumer Johal, Executive Director of AgStack.

33% of the food is wasted, while 9% of the world's people are hungry or malnourished. These social drivers are intertwined with traditional technological systems that are too slow and inefficient to play a role in growing and more complex agricultural supply chains. AgStack will use collaboration and open source software to build the digital infrastructure of the 21st century, which will be a catalyst for new applications, efficiency, and scale innovation.

AgStack includes an open repository for creating and publishing models, free and easy access to public data, an interoperability framework for cross-project use, and topic-specific extensions and toolkits. It will leverage existing technologies such as agricultural standards (AgGateway, FAO, CAFA, USDA and NASA-AR), public data (Landsat, Sentinel, NOAA and Soilgrids; models (UC-ANR IPM), and open source projects such as Hyperledger, Kubernetes, open Horizon, Postgres, Django, and so on.

"We are pleased to provide a forum for AgStand to build and develop," said Mike Dolan, general manager and senior vice president of the Linux Foundation Project. It is clear that by using open source software to standardize agricultural digital infrastructure, AgStack can reduce costs, accelerate integration, and enable innovation. It's amazing to see industries such as agriculture use open source principles for innovation. "

For more information about AgStack, please visit: http://www.agstack.org

Member / partner statement

Calling code

"through CallforCode and IBM's TechforGood project, we have seen amazing grass-roots innovation created by developers who develop solutions to solve local agricultural problems that affect them personally," said DanielKrook, CallforCode's IBM chief technology officer. As prosperous, sustainable open source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation, applications like Agrolly and Posiple PrIP have access to a strong ecosystem of partners. And the impact of them can be accelerated by opening up the sharing framework of machine learning models, datasets, libraries and message formats. And the api provided by AgStack. "

Global center

"Interoperability means working together, and open source has proved to be the most practical way. Centricity Global looks forward to bringing our teams, tools, and applications to the AgStack community and driving projects that provide meaningful value in the long run, "says Centricity Global's Drew Zabrocki. AgStack's concept of docking is a novel way to bring people and technology together in a common but sovereign framework; I think there is great potential to promote interoperability and data sovereignty to provide real value to farms throughout the supply value chain. "