Dr. Dorn Cox comes on the show to tell us about the work of OpenTEAM (Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management), and their efforts to foster the interoperability of farm data platforms by using an open-source ethos and scaling by collaboration.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Dr. Dorn Cox, who is the research director at Wolfsneck Center for Agriculture and the Environment and director for the Open Team Collaborative. Thanks for being here, Dorn. Our paths have intersected quite a few times with Nori. We track your progress. We’re happy to hear of all the things that you’re doing. And we saw that big news happened with Open Team. I saw a press release come out and a bunch of articles.
So What exactly is OpenTeam and what is happening right now?
Dorn Cox: Well, first, it’s great to be here and it’s wonderful to be joining the Nori community, which is doing such great work. OpenTeam is an acronym for Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management. So it’s the collection of technology And communities, technical communities that together are able to create the technical ecosystem to address some of these really complex agricultural systems. So OpenTeam is really the collaboration that brings all of those pieces together to address global soil health and climate change together.
Ross Kenyon: And the news that I saw is that you’re now officially launching.
Dorn Cox: Yeah, that’s correct. So this has actually been going on for many years, this formal and informal collaboration between a number of the core technology partners. What OpenTeam officially launching symbolizes is really the launch of a collaborative collaboration. Formally through in partnership with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. So a lot of this informal collaboration will now be explicitly funded. So all of those partners work will continue as it has. And the part that makes our work interoperable and more than the sum of its parts is what the theme of the open team funding is all about.
Ross Kenyon: Understood. What would you say is the need for a project like OpenTeam? Because there’s lots and lots of groups in ag tech who are working on data and trying to find ways to make very handy apps for farmers so they have all their data in one place that they can analyze it, that they can make agronomic decisions around it. What do you think is the differentiator for a group like OpenTeam?
Dorn Cox: Yeah. And I mean, I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to address is that there’s so much potential innovation and so much actual innovation happening on the ground because of the explosion of the availability of AI and Internet of Things and increased levels of processing power that’s accessible to both farmers and service providers globally. But many of those systems don’t actually talk to each other. And so there haven’t been Great incentive to pull those things together. And yet we know that from a systems perspective, they all are made a lot more powerful when they do talk to each other and feedback.
And so as you’ll see within the Open Team Collaborative, It’s not just food system companies or technology companies or government entities and agencies or farmer organizations. It’s all of those together that have a piece of the puzzle and can tell a bigger picture story. That’s relevant to each farmer. So we’re bringing together, again, this ecosystem of tools that no individual organization can provide, but together we can provide much better intelligence that’s actionable at the farm level. We have a lot of academic tools that describe the way the biogeochemistry works, the way the carbon and nitrogen and water cycles work, but they often don’t have a farmer interface so that it’s not made immediately useful for making practical decisions at the ground level.
And so that’s part of what Open Team does is linking these innovative farmer-focused apps that are collecting detailed data that can be used for agronomic purposes and tying that in with things like remote sensing and these powerful models to provide feedback that’s actually useful at the farm level. And I think one of the really important things in this revolution towards regenerative ag and improved soil health Is that the big variable is often not inputs, it’s actually knowledge. It’s about what should be planted where and how as the key variable to rapid carbon accumulation in the soil.
And so creating these improved knowledge systems requires a different sort of infrastructure and a different kind of collaboration to really be effective.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, one of the trends that I’ve seen and not just in ag tech and data platforms for farmers, but just generally is there’s sort of two schools of thought that are competing and one of which is this walled garden approach where maybe Yeah. But it sounds like you’re seeing some of the limitations with that and are trying to get people to say, we’re all better off if we adopt the more open source ethos and can actually develop technology that communicates with one another and we have way more people working on it or something akin to that.
Is that broadly correct?
Dorn Cox: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that’s why, you know, the partnership with Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research has been so important because they have this idea of they promote the idea of pre-competitive space. Yes, we want to actually create innovation and competition, but at the production of services level, you know, when we’re actually implementing. But when it comes to science and the way the world works and scaling through collaboration, we think is a much better way to accelerate innovation. If we’re all competing on the way soil microbes are releasing greenhouse gases or not or accumulating carbon, Then we’re actually not implementing and creating more innovations as quickly as we possibly can.
So I like to think of it in terms of the kinds of efforts like the Human Genome Project or the Haldron Collider, where it’s this public science on top of which we can create really the next generation of innovation and businesses that will dwarf sort of the competition at the base science level. So I think it’s a combination to enable sort of this productive innovation and competition, this much broader collaboration. And we focus more on sort of interoperability to still allow for innovation, but making sure that what we’re building is in concert with what others are doing.
So it’s sort of this informed collaboration, but not a strict integration between everyone because that becomes unmanageable.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s an interesting hybrid. One of the things that I’ve seen about data science, and I’m basically a total neophyte on this, so I’m open to being corrected, is that oftentimes the sample sizes for data is very small, especially when you are in this competitive space and actually having access to much more data is better for everyone involved.
Dorn Cox: It’s such a great point and really important with the kinds of science that we’re doing here is, you know, it’s not feasible to collect the level of detailed data with the traditional sort of lab-based model or the replicated block design on sort of hypothesized production systems. In order to be effective and to accelerate innovation, we need to be collecting data in real production environments, in all of those associations. And so we need to create a system that is rapidly gathering those positive deviants that are outliers in one system that Where the data might be otherwise thrown out, those are the ones that we really want to concentrate on and create higher resolution data sets that can be used to calibrate and validate this next generation of lower cost, higher measurement tools, both in the field but also for remote sensing and calibrating our models.
And things like infield spectroscopy or handheld spectroscopy are very low cost, but in order for them to be effective, they need these large data sets, just like AI image analysis needs learning data sets. So that’s also what we’re trying to do is create the technical and social infrastructure to provide that data to unlock the potential for the next generation of sort of democratized access to environmental knowledge. So I was going to add to that because there’s so much to creating that large data set and creating of incentives to share, to create and calibrate the next generation of decision tools and hardware in the field, that I think that one of the things that gets missed a lot when we’re talking about open source tools is confusing that with Essentially data privacy or totally open data.
So part of what we’re creating with OpenTeam is also greater data security and farmer control of their own data. And I think that’s really important as a foundation for increasing trust and scaling a system like this, where there are incentives built in to share it, but the default is that data is private. And that’s true for farm data, but it’s also true for corporate data. And Where there is data that is public, public data sets, that is made freely available and accessible to all as well. So it’s very important to sort of separate open source tools, which is like the blueprints for how everything works, from public data sets like plants and soils data and input data and climate and weather data and the way geospatial data is handled.
That’s all public. Then we have our individual data that should be protected. And it has value not only to the farmer, but it has value to researchers. It has value to governments. It has value to ecosystem service markets. It has value to corporations. So I think it’s really important to separate those two. That part of what makes this work is open source technology that promotes interoperability and our larger common agricultural knowledge base. And greater control and local understanding of how to apply all of that and put it into practice.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for adding that. I think that’s a very good point. And that’s one that we at Nori have spoken quite a lot about. Farmers are protective of their data. Who can blame them? You never know what it’s going to be used for, if it will be used against you. So I think there’s a good reason to balance that open source ethos when it comes to developing the tech, but also maintaining privacy for users. I think that’s generally the sweet spot. So I’m happy to hear that open team. We’re fellow travelers.
I’m happy to hear that.
Dorn Cox: Absolutely. And so we’re building that. I mean, one of the kind of exciting things that happens when you build These large system software is that the software is really a reflection of the underlying culture that we’re creating. And so that’s part of the sort of the architecture that we’re building. And I mean, I’ve certainly not surprisingly seen alignment with the Nori community on a lot of these subjects.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m happy to hear it. Well, there’s a lot of partners named in this press release. And also, you’ve alluded to them a few times. So who exactly is OpenTeam working with right now?
Dorn Cox: Yeah, so I like to sort of divide it in. So there are several different types of partners that really make up the ecosystem and all of those partners that we’re launching with play an important role. I also like to make the point that the partner list It’s not an exclusive list. It’s including but not limited to, and the intention is to grow the partnership across the spectrum. So the press release announced particularly our technology partners and a few of our supply chain and farmer network partners, but it’s not exclusive. And I really sort of separate that.
It’s really this larger farmer network community partners and again, our technology partners, which I divide Into some general categories. So we have partners that are focusing on the technology side around observation tech. So those are folks like the RSI group, which represents the technology behind the Yale Quick Carbon Project and the handheld nutrient density meter for the Real Food Campaign. And a project with USDA Agricultural Research Service called Land PKS, the Land Potential Knowledge System. And so that’s an app for doing high quality ground cover and soils analysis where high resolution soils maps don’t exist or to upgrade them when they do.
And so it walks users through ways in which we can take very high quality samples in the field in a replicated manner and works very well internationally and offline as well. And then FarmOS, which is the farm management record keeping system, which is a universal way in which we can structure agricultural activity data that promotes interoperability across systems. So regardless of what sort of farm management system is, We also have remote sensing partners through our partnership with Applied Geosolutions, which works a lot with NASA and satellite imagery, and they have a suite of products Including the operational tillage information system to remotely sense field boundaries, tillage practices, cover crops.
And they have a larger suite in terms of how to handle geo information. And there’s another group of technical partners that focus on biogeochemistry, essentially the agroecosystem models like Comet Farm, which I know that Nori has an ongoing relationship with. And the denitrification decarbonization model that applied GeoSolutions is also maintaining and expanding. And the Cool Farm Tool, which is another version of sort of whole farm and supply chain greenhouse gas calculator. And to wrap it up around this sort of, if you imagine sort of a circle of handoffs from field observations through analysis analysis, Back to essentially communication and interpretation of that analysis.
And that’s where the decision support tool partnerships come in. And so those are folks like the Cover Crop Council tools that have seeding rate calculators and economics. And so a lot of those tools come out of university systems like Cornell and NRCS and ARS and so forth. But often, again, each of them historically would require additional data entry for each of them to work. With OpenTeam, a farmer will be able to enter data once in one app and use that same data for multiple purposes. And things like organic certification or entering it in Comet Farm, they can then use it for site-specific recommendations.
So it’s a little bit like a Google account for your farm data, and you can pull it and push it to give permissions to use that same data in multiple applications, but still maintaining farmer control. And then I would add some of the other parts. Partners are really like the supply chain partners working with getting this technology into the field in the hands of farmers, applying human-centered design to make these apps and tools useful for making day-to-day decisions while they’re still supporting gathering high-resolution data that can be used for things like environmental service markets.
Like carbon markets, for example. And those include the Soil Health Partnership, for example, General Mills Regenerative Oats Project, and Stonyfield and their farmer networks and associated networks, and then Through RSI, managing real food campaign networks that includes partners across the country, including the city of Boulder and Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Alliance, and a whole bunch of other folks, including partnerships with folks like the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Ag, PASA, and others. So the list gets a little unwieldy. And so part of what we’re going to be really working with an open team is to acknowledge these substantial contributions and organize these partnerships in a coherent way so that all of these contributions are recognized and celebrated because we really think coming together in this kind of collaboration is something that part of the currency in open source is recognition for these substantial contributions.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s quite a list. There’s a lot in there.
Dorn Cox: And I’m sure there are many others. But I want to use this again, including but not limited to, because the network is really expansive. And since we launched, I should mention, a lot of the interest is really from other technology and farmer networks, asking how do they connect in and work within the Open Team framework to add their work so we can have a compounding effect. So each of our work isn’t in isolation, but really in addition.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds terrific to me. And our friends at Region Network podcast alums, they’re on there too.
Dorn Cox: Exactly. And there’s an example. And I would say Inori, likewise, are both examples where they exist on top of this ecosystem. And really, OpenTeam is designed to create... Essentially, the raw materials in terms of high resolution data with providence that can feed into an organization and tools that Regen Network is creating in terms of smart contracts for environmental data and being able to handle and create those financial incentives for exchange that benefit the farmer. And benefit the environmental service markets like Nori’s building. So I see additional sort of flavors of partnerships as Open Team matures.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah, that’s wonderful. Well, Dorn, if someone wanted to become a partner or keep up with what Open Team is developing, what might be the best way for them to do so? And who are you looking for, by the way? What are like the high value partners that maybe they’re listening and could join?
Dorn Cox: Joining Open Team is really a matter of joining Open Team is that you’re willing to be collaborative. So the process is really a process of creating An MOU with the Secretariat, the Director of Open Team, and then participating. And it’s about sharing and keeping up to date. So that’s the core criteria, which sounds so simple, and yet it is a revolutionary concept when it comes to research and public science and agriculture in the near term. Over the longer term, I think it’s very consistent with the way agricultural Philosophy has ebbed and flowed in agrarian societies, but I think it’s a really exciting time to be doing this kind of work.
And there are so many high-value partnerships that I’m excited to pursue because, again, this is a very broad systems-based science and there’s so many contributions from so many different directions that will be valuable to really meet the challenge of accelerating carbon capture globally and getting site-specific data into the hands of people. So it’s not just farm organizations, although that’s really important is to have really large Robust farmer networks that are able to provide environmental feedback, but also feedback in terms of how the system is working and participate in improving this sort of this adaptive management, this agile design, human centered design of the product.
Meanwhile, sort of learning by doing. So I think creating that culture is really important, having partners that are willing to do that. But it’s also technology partners in AI, in image analysis, in hardware. And in human centered design in the process of getting this all into a usable form. So I think there are many, many conversations that are moving forward simultaneously. And I feel like each of these, each of our partners have sort of represent some of the core elements. Technologies and communities that are important. I would love to see some of the larger proprietary players also come to the table and embrace interoperability as well, because I think there’s a really strong value statement from those perspectives where they can still innovate on customer service.
And really build and focus businesses on getting the best interpretation of the data and analysis in the hands of people while also accelerating the exchange of knowledge and what actually works on the field to accelerate carbon capture, soil health, and improvement in the quality of the foods that we’re producing and the environmental outcomes.
Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s great. There’s so many people involved from so many angles. One of the persistent things I like about working at Nori is I’m forced to realize just how much technological work is being done in agriculture. And it definitely seems like sky’s the limit on this. And philosophically, very, very much kindred with all that you’re saying. Dorn, I hope that’s a great success. I hope that mission inspires people, teaches people. I hope you’re able to make progress a lot faster. We’re trying to reverse climate change here and help soil health.
And I think that’s the way to do it. I don’t think proprietary siloing is really going to get us the whole way. So thanks for showing so much leadership in this dimension.
Dorn Cox: Yeah, I mean, I completely agree and also feel that the solutions will be emergent here. And so this is really a prototype for how to collaborate in a new way and a larger system scale with tools that previously just haven’t been available to work really collaboratively on a global scale before. So I think this is a really exciting opportunity. And I’m thrilled to be part of it. Also, I want to acknowledge all the leadership and all the risks that all the partners have taken to take the first step towards this new way of working together.
And I include very clearly Nori in that direction. And yet, together, we have this amazing ecosystem of tools that we can pull together to make progress. So both at the same time that our situation, I find it really fascinating that as we understand the urgency of our situation, The tools that we need to understand that and to take action are developing just behind at a similar pace, like accelerating very quickly and just behind. So I think our opportunity is if we just tweak how we’re using those tools, we can flip the script and we can be a little ahead of that pace of change and we can accelerate our understanding of the systems before it’s...
Before we reach some of these more unpleasant thresholds, environmental and biogeochemical thresholds.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I hope you’re right. That would be good to know. Well, Dawn, we should start wrapping it up. Where might someone keep up with what OpenTeam is doing? What’s the best place for getting more information, contacting you, et cetera? And why don’t you draw us out to what’s coming next? What might people be able to see from OpenTeam in the next unit of time?
Dorn Cox: Yeah, thanks for the prompt. In the short term, contact me directly. I will get you on the list for regular updates and for convenings that were going to be happening around agricultural conferences throughout the year. And also specific gatherings on the technology side with GOAT events, the gatherings for Open Ag Tech. So join that community, goattech.org for sure, that all of our Open Team events and technical conversations will continue to happen there. And we will be launching a Open Team dedicated community website, openteam. community. In the October timeframe, so stay tuned for that.
And the next phase will really be an opportunity to test this suite of tools. A number of the tools are already available for the field season for what’s coming up Next, we’ll really be signing up for getting in-field testing at a network of hub farms that are representative of very diverse production systems of all scales and geographies. So we’ll be announcing the process for joining both as a regular hub farm and then the representative farms that will be putting additional effort into where we’ll be hosting much more in-depth convenings and feedback sessions.
So stay tuned for all of that. And I look forward to hearing from folks from your community.
Ross Kenyon: Sure. And if you’re out there listening, I will put both the press release that this episode is based on, Dorn’s contact information, how to get involved in Open Team. That will all be in the show notes as it typically is for whichever episode we do. Dorn, thank you so much for being here. This probably should have been a reversing climate change episode. We’re pushing the formal limits of Carbon Removal Newsroom. We’re saying too many things I just couldn’t let slide by without comment.
Dorn Cox: Yeah, well, it’s my pleasure and happy to come back anytime.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you. And if you like the show, please share it with your friends. Rate and review it on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Or actually, I found out that Stitcher has reviews natively inside of their app. So if you’re listening on Stitcher, please rate and review us there. It definitely helps us get the word out about carbon removal. If you think what we’re doing is important, I would very much appreciate your support in this way. And thank you so much for listening.
