(Lyndsey Jackson) The glow of agtech promises a future where farmers farm better, growing more food at a lower cost while they improve the quality of their soil. The reality in Australia is that we have a lot of good will, but agtech remains underfunded, and many applications and platforms are struggling to simultaneously survive and build scale, integration, and interoperability.


In 2019 Lyndsey took on the CTO role of Australian agtech startup Platfarm. The function of the application had been proven, but the work of attracting funding, reengineering for scale, and releasing the application in stores was still ahead.

While leading a small team through this journey, we also took the time to spearhead the development of open data standards for the viticulture industry through the “Collabriculture” project. This project brought together grape growers, industry stakeholders, startups, and developer and mapping experts for a series of workshops leading to the creation of the viticulture data standards.

These standards, published openly on github help developers with the naming conventions and considerations of the data model that makes up a vineyard when they go to build, and of course this should make future data sharing easier.

Open source mapping standards have been used internally and in the community work we have led. Using Mapbox and Open Street Maps means that data elements such as vine rows, block boundaries, and satellite imagery have been able to be more easily shared.

The use of open source software and approaches makes it easier to talk about interoperability and to nudge others into thinking about how the data they input can be shared, exported, and used in other applications.

Data standards in the agtech industry are also important and evolving. Farms as a business have a right and expectation that they will have control over the data from their business, and at the same time there is data that if shared helps regions and growing practices. So we will look at this a bit as well.

And last but not least we will talk about farmers and growers and those working on farms to give an insight into considerations to help developers build tools that will make a difference.

https://lca2022.linux.org.au/schedule...

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Sun Jan 16 13:30:00 2022 at Yuma Theatre