For growers using precision technology communication between different systems has been a major struggle. Today the Agricultural Data Applications Programming Toolkit, or ADAPT, will allow users to move between software and hardware applications without the major pain points of the past. AgGateway’s ADAPT Committee is working to with software companies to coordinate plug-ins necessary for ADAPT’s use.
“This is the year we will finally have a solution to interoperability, which has been a formidable hurdle to the use of precision ag technologies,” said ADAPT Committee Chairman Mark Stelford, General Manager of Premier Crop Systems. “ADAPT represents a monumental amount of work over several years, by a lot of people. Now we’re alerting software companies that it’s time for them to develop the ‘plug-in’ technology on their ends to facilitate broad industry 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).
Currently there are several companies already in the process of creating the necessary plug-in for their formats. For example, John Deere reports that ADAPT can easily convert a Deere file to an AgLeader formate without any more input from the user. Topcon and AGCO have also agreed to develop the an ADAPT- ISO plug-in.
“This plug-in will greatly simplify the task of supporting the ISO standards for both farm management software and terminal companies,” said Joe Tevis, a Senior Advisor to Topcon Precision Agriculture who is also active in AgGateway precision ag initiatives. “While Topcon and AGCO have provided the initial coding, it is officially an open source project and we welcome all interested companies to contribute to this effort.”
The list of companies participating in the ADAPT 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.
Companies involved with ADAPT through AgGateway’s SPADE Project are: 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 resources to help with implementation go to www.ADAPTFramework.org.