If you would like please feel free to add your organization and where you're calling in from today in the Zoom chat. We'll just be using this chat function for the next couple of minutes as we get started, and then we welcome and encourage you to use the q&a function. As you have questions come up, please feel free to add them into the q&a. So later on, after a bit of discussion, we can we can answer them live. So again, thanks for joining us for a session on continual improvement and measurement and soil health. And as you're joining, feel free to add your organization and where you're calling in from today.
All right. So again, we'll be using this chat function just for the next couple of minutes and then we're, if you have questions, we'd love them. And feel free to enter them into q&a. If we don't get to all your questions, we'll answer these after today and post them on our website. So do please feel free to continue to ask all your questions. And again, we'd love to hear where you're calling in from and what organizations you're representing. Today. Right Dorn it's a couple minutes after I'm going to turn it over to you.
Great, thank you so much, Laura. My name is Dorn Cox and I'm a project lead for OpenTEAM also research director at Wolfe's Neck Center. And I've had the pleasure of working on these issues by myself. So I'm really excited about sharing the work of OpenTEAM with you today. Because it taps in to the intersection between his larger sharing endeavor the intersection of agriculture as a public science and this shared multi generational effort that really bridges bridges, this system science, but that needs to be applied on the ground and the unique circumstances of our communities to support all land stewards and land stewardship. So I'm excited to again explore with you today and throughout the rest of this series. And invite you to join us for the rest of this series as we merge science and agricultural communities and technologies. And you'll hear today that this group is really sort of at the forefront of that and some of the nuance, but that we'll see how these ideas ripple throughout our shared work as we dive in not only today but on the other upcoming series which will include focus on data interoperability, and architecture or equity in practice in regenerative agriculture and how we can cultivate community as we break down silos. So we welcome your participation today and throughout the series. And with that, I'd like to hand the reins of this conversation today over to Leah puro. And, and to bring this exciting panel of folks, to you.
Great. Hi, everyone. I'm Leah, I have the pleasure of organizing our body of work around field methodology and applying the open ag tech toolkit in the field at Wolfe's Neck Center in Freeport Maine, on our dairy and vegetable operations are so excited to share this body of work with you today. So to bridge the work of land stewards, technical service providers and researchers within the open ag tech Toolkit OpenTEAM created the field methods working group in March of 2020. This group is made up of scientists, researchers, farmers, ranchers, representatives from ecosystem service markets, tech developers, and really anyone in the OpenTEAM community who's interested in on the ground field measurement. We saw a need to align field methods and create standardization for aggregated datasets to answer big agricultural research questions across various production types, scales and regions for cost, share and incentive programs that connect with the emerging ecosystem service markets. So at a high level our goals in this group are to provide ranchers and farmers with a set of tools and protocols to monitor ecological function on their property to test and develop tools and methods that improve monitoring and speed up adoption of soil health practices, and to measure ecological function of agricultural landscapes and identify relationships with management practices. Over the course of the last few years, we've gathered needs from our community and focused on a few paths to achieve these goals. We value transparency and collaboration in our work and use virgin approaches to allow for input of new ideas, new science and new technologies as they emerge. Within the agricultural fields. We worked with our OpenTEAM hubs gathering information on research goals and methodologies to create a set of field methodology recipe cards, which are an analogue version of what will become a field methodology decision support tool coded into SurveyStack. One of our tools in the ecosystem. This will allow users of SurveyStack to easily share research protocols and methodology and will foster community collaboration across regions scales and production systems, ensuring that the same data is collected and stored in the same way. The information in these cards is to really assist land stewards technical service providers and researchers choose the right research protocols for their various goals, research questions and resources. In addition to that, we've engaged with the NRCS and USDA to ensure that the protocols are aligned with conservation planning and incentives for farmers and ranchers. And lastly for the last several months, we've been working on our carbon series, this has focused on defining and communicating key considerations for carbon quantification methodologies for various goals, scales and management practices. The group is using a point blue project use case for creating standardized, efficient and robust carbon monitoring protocols for a range of management practices. The two main objectives of these projects are to provide blueprints for ranchers and technical service providers to track changes in carbon and to help build a large scale verifiable data set that documents changes and carbons. Now that these protocols can support producers and technical service providers more broadly, as the carbon series wrap this month. Participants are continuing to refine the protocols and we look forward to sharing these with you in the future. As more farmers and ranchers join the work we're doing through OpenTEAM We must continue to align measurement protocols and field methods to better compare and analyze soil health data, improving soil health both locally and globally. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Ashlynn and the panelists to share their work within the ecosystem with you today. Take it away Ashton.
So I'm actually I'm an agricultural ecologist rather than SILC research. I'm the Product Owner FarmOS. So it's my job to take from user requirements and turn them into software. With Dawn and my can with FarmOS team. That's obviously not my job today. Today. I will be moderating this discussion. We have four panelists, Dan TerAvest, Patrick Lawrence, shaylen, Kolodny and Tata curry. I'm not going to introduce them. I'm going to hand that baton over to each of them and get them to be who they are and what they do within OpenTEAM. But just a quick overview of the discussion. So we've got we've got three different areas. We'll spend about 10 minutes discussing each. The first is bridging science and technology. The second is creating shared methods also sharing research and monitoring protocols. And then the third one is how do we go about creating flexible and adaptable ways of improving and also of course, those kinds of research methods. So on that one, I will hand over to each of the panelists asking them to tell us who they are, and what their role has really been within OpenTEAM So maybe you'll first of my list, Patrick, so do you want to go first?
Sure. Um, yeah, so my name is Patrick Lawrence. I collaborate or I've been represented representing the Cool Farm Alliance within the OpenTEAM tech group. I also work closely with the sustainable food or inconvenient timing. I'm with the Sustainable Food Lab in Vermont and also consulting company. So I do a lot of I work at the intersection between soil science and and in technology and applied agriculture. And yeah, I've been working with the so with the tech group and then also with the, the carbon carbon group. So I spent the last 10 years of my life trying to understand spatial variability in soil so it's been gratifying to see that progress and to see all the work that's been put into it, especially in the last half year.
Definitely caught me out on a few of my methodological errors now and then I'm shaylen Would you like to introduce yourself?
Yeah. Hi. Firstly, I'm just thankful to be here on a panel with with all of you Ashley and Patrick, Dan and Chelsea, um, but I am I work at key fork farms, which is a regenerative farm in Middle Tennessee, and we use intensive rotational grazing to raise our cattle lambs and we have pasture raised pigs as well as diversifies vegetable garden, but another big focus of ours is research and a special emphasis on soil health and soil carbon. And my job here is both I'm a livestock hand and the research coordinator. So I appreciate my my work because I'm able to see our farming operation as a farmer when I'm out working with the livestock and then I also get to, um, you know, work on developing the research questions that are useful for both our farm in a practical way to inform our management but also also for the larger agricultural community. And that's kind of where I work at key for farms ties in with OpenTEAM is, is sharing our research and our data and just gaining insight and inspiration from OpenTEAM, which I'm excited to talk more about. hear more about here today. So thank you
thank you share them. And then Chelsea, you're next in line on my screen.
Yeah, hi. Good morning or good afternoon everyone. My name is Chelsea Carrie. I am I work for point blue conservation science. We're a nonprofit, just based just north of San Francisco in California. And we focused generally on climate smart conservation. So we've been around for about 50 years and we have a long history of conducting ecological monitoring to inform conservation action. I serve as the research director for our working lands group and I'm a soil ecologist by training. My background has really focused on soil microbial ecology and biogeochemistry. And we, as part of our working lands group, we have a strong focus on managing and conducting science around rangelands stewardship. in particular. And so we monitor over 100 ranches right now as and we monitor sort of we have this multiple benefits perspective where we look at above ground biodiversity but also below ground soil health. We take the soil health perspective as well and that's where a lot of my work comes in. And so our work in many ways is synergistic with what OpenTEAM is aiming to do. And we've really in the past year or so leaned into engaging in the field methods working group and I've had the pleasure of working with many on this call and more on the carbon series, and I'll be able to talk more about that later. So thanks so much.
I feel like we should say Thompson's completely unsettling herself. Yes, she leads a massive body of the work of the cotton serious stuff. And and your your next. Alright, thanks.
Yeah, I'm pleasure to be here with a great panel today. My name is Dan Travis. I'm one of the cofounders of our psi. So we are a startup technology company. I think we're in about our fourth year. Our goal is really to support communities that want to engage in their own research and we've been really working hand in hand with OpenTEAM for the last few years to develop tools that really focus on improving data, interoperability, standardizing methodologies and things like that some of the tools that we'll hear about later in this session are the questions that Library, Farmers coffee shop we're also engaged with. Some ecosystem service marketplace tools like a tool chain called soil stack, which is about helping you determine where to put your probe in the ground for soil carbon sampling and kind of guiding you there. So some of these other tools. Originally, you know, trained as a soil scientist, and then have somehow found myself in this weird nexus between bridging the divide between kind of infield users of technology and the technology development teams.
Thank you. Um, I must say, I've used some of your surveys before, which has been incredibly helpful. So with that introduction done, I think what we'll do is we'll move on to the first round of questions. So this idea of bridging the gap between science and technology, and of course, there's a big commercial space here. So the first question we kind of wanted to discuss and where you have four panelists see how you know, why do you think open source technology is important specifically, in bridging that gap? Yeah, I don't know. Patrick?
Sure. Yeah, I can, I can jump in first. Um, so I don't know if any of you on the call have had the experience of trying to look at a research paper and actually interpret what the researchers did and turning that into practice, but it's extremely difficult and often painful, especially if you're working with multiple research papers. So I kind of think of open source as working in it's totally different model than than that where you don't have to mean thing from bits and pieces where you aren't trying to read between the lines, but you actually have everything spelled out for you to understand exactly what is going on in the source code and can actually use the tools that have been developed under open to license. So I think that really the open source model provides a way to have this real transparency in the methods that are being used, and then also reproducibility and and the ability to replicate what's been done in one location in another location. That's, that's one of the primary benefits I can see. Especially in terms of the time.
And then, I mean, Sharon and Chelsea you have a lot of practical experience. One I mean, from a research point of view, and then from an actual implementation point of view, I suppose as well. So in what way would you say why would you select an open technology? You know, when there are there's quite a few actually close off merging technologies. Why did you go for being a member of OpenTEAM?
Yeah, I mean, I think I would agree and just echo everything that Patrick said, and I think, um, you know, the open source aspect of OpenTEAM and the technologies that it's helping to sort of build them facilitate is critical for you know, adoption, and for transparency. And I and on the ground that that, you know, that the importance of that I think is amplified from a scaling perspective, both from sort of the scientific community but also from a practitioner community. So I think it's great, you know, to really lean into that and try to build that out.
Until and you're like, you're on the boots on the ground.
Yeah, I would say that, um, for us, you know, we're all trying to share our story about how, you know, the management practices that we're implementing are affecting our soil health and our soil carbon. And so that means that we need data that shows our progress over time, and that we need data that not only accurate but also meaningful and comparable to other members of the agricultural and scientific community so that we can be sharing our story in a way that is useful to others working towards similar goals in the regenerative community. I think that open source technology is is the best way to you know, access those protocols and those methodologies so that they can all be comparable. So really, yeah, just echoing what Patrick and Chelsea said
and done because you'll, you'll hear it from a very different perspective, right? You're a developer. Why? Why be an open source developer in this space?
Yeah, so our goal in our mission within our psi is really to allow shaylen to amplify her story right? She just talked about that. Like we believe that communities should be able to conduct their own high quality research and are perfectly capable of answering has complex of question Has any corporation or you know, other research institution, however, the communities can't engage and be successful if everything is blackbox if everything is really expensive and licensed and you don't understand what's happening under the hood, so for us, I don't see how we could be successful in supporting Shaelyn if we're putting everything in that black box
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this, I mean, this leads us quite nicely then into the next step of our discussion, right, which is, you know, the creating of shared methodologies research monitoring protocols. I think we said earlier this work started in 2020. So we've we've all spent a long lockdown building shared technologies, and it's a challenge because it's a big group of people who have to agree, but equally, I think it's wonderful in terms of the fact that you get some very diverse opinions. So Chelsea, I don't know if maybe you wanted to comment on that. In terms of because you've done so much, but also in terms of your role with point bloom. Yeah,
happy to. So for, I guess, for those who are familiar with what's been going on with the carbon series we've had so in the past year point blue and collaborators at Colorado State University and Mad Agriculture were awarded some funding by the Foundation for food and ag research, to launch a project to better understand how carbon dynamics respond to rangelands stewardship, and a big part of that has been trying to support ecological monitoring of carbon on rangelands, but through the development of protocols that are really flexible but but sort of rigorous and standardized where they need to be and we've opted to develop these protocols through a collaborative process. And we've we decided on that for a number of reasons. I think first and foremost, because, you know, when you bring dozens of sharp minds to the table through, you know, practitioner working groups, technical working groups, open teams carbon series, the product that we're going to create is going to be much stronger, more defensible, and hopefully more usable than, you know, if it's just me and my team, creating these protocols sort of on our own in the little corner. And so I found that to absolutely I think be the case it's been such an amazing process to co develop these protocols with OpenTEAM and others. It also I think, when we found at point blue when you develop protocols and monitoring frameworks that really their adoption, you know, can be accelerated. And this goes beyond protocol development. And I think this goes to research projects and, and other aspects of sort of science as well, when they're co developed with the end user group. You know, the folks who are going to be using the information or the technologies, the adoption rate is going to hopefully be increased because you are making sure that you're designing something that addresses the needs, and you're doing so in a way that is had input from the end user community, hopefully throughout. And so those were some of the other motivations for developing it from in a collaborative way. And the um, so the way that we've organized this and as Leah had said, that these protocols are really meant to map on to specific range of management practices. So that are, you know, incentivize through Healthy Soils programs like the ones we have in California. They are incentivized to, you know, NRCS their conservation practices. So these are things like hedgerow plantings, riparian restoration now compost additions, prescribed grazing, and their planned foreign carbon farm plans often as well. And so we saw an opportunity here to develop protocols that can map on to the specific practices be used to inform on ranch stewardship and storytelling, and then and participation in programs for instance, and then also be able to be aggregated at scale, and over time helped to inform our understanding of how these practices influence carbon from a scientific standpoint, feedback hopefully into things like Comet planner and other decision support tools to help refine our estimates on the front end, and so working with OpenTEAM in the carbon series, what we've done is every two weeks we've met since GOSH, I don't know August, to talk through design aspects that would inform ultimately inform these protocols. And so that includes talking about how Yeah, how do you decide where to put points? How can we best estimate the number of samples across you know, space and practices? You know, how,
you know, what about things like stratification? So all of these really nitty gritty design aspects that are going to matter both from sort of a rigor and inference level, but also usability. Level, and we began meeting with open teams carbon series, before we organized our technical working group for the project specifically, which is primarily made up of California specific scientists. And then before we organized our practitioner working group as well, and I mean, it's just been invaluable to be able to workshop through these ideas with all the fantastic minds on the OpenTEAM carbon series. And, and, and it's been such a pleasure and I think I'll, that was kind of a lot. I think I'll end there maybe maybe I'll just say one more thing that you know, as a next step, so we've been really thinking about the protocols on the front end in terms of, you know, how do we get these into folks hands so that they can, they can they can use them on the ground. But you know, we are having conversations with Dan and his team and others at OpenTEAM to think about, can we integrate them from a data collection standpoint? So once people are collecting this information, where does it go? And can we leverage the hard work that Dan and his team are doing to you know, to feed that information into a database that can do sign up used to do science at scale from scientists, but also and be used and given back to land stewards as decision support tool so they can interpret the information that they're getting? There? Yeah,
I mean, it is, but it's it's a huge ecosystem. And I think for me, it means it's like you're not just doing one thing in isolation, you have the support of a group of specialists. So it is a long thing to discuss, because it is actually the ecosystem so complicated. And then I mean, but then you have to implement this on the ground, right? Because we're looking at this near from science or conservation point of view. And you've got to do it on the ground. Right. So do you want to talk us through maybe exactly how you would apply those methods to the risk, like the practical management research questions you mentioned earlier?
Yeah, also testing I was talking about how, you know, creating this protocols through collaboration is makes everything sort of resilience, not the right word, but you know, the best the best way to do it because we can all collaborate and and know what are the best ways to do everything. So, for me, I'm creating research questions that are practical both for our farming operation and the agricultural community. OpenTEAM has really assisted us at can you fork farms, one, just by hosting, listing a space where we can talk with other hubs and other farms and understanding what research they're doing and what protocols they're doing. So that we can, you know, decide whether that's something that is worthwhile for our operation, and that information is worth doing, or, or, you know, creating, figuring out like, what to do in general. And so, just the idea of collaborating with other hubs, which is something that OpenTEAM Foster's This is really assists us in our research. And then also, um, sometimes we get insights as to what research to do from other heart hubs, but other times we have our own ideas on what research to do, and then we can rely on OpenTEAM to have tools or to have a set of protocols that we can look to to implement on the ground level, because it's really difficult to know exactly what protocols to follow that will be useful in in sort of seeing how we are compared to other farms. Because if we're collecting data, with one set of protocols and other forms of protecting, collecting data with a different set, there's no way to compare. And so the work that Chelsea's doing, and the tools that Dan Patrick are creating are really useful for us on the ground level and I know that Dan will be able to speak more about this but the questions that library is something that, you know, is I'm really looking forward to as a way to have like standardized data collection and protocols that will help unify the research and help us know how to collect it in a way that is reliable and accessible. And then also, I just wanted to point out how awesome the suite of technology that OpenTEAM is creating and how useful it is. In in in the community. For example, at our farm, aside from OpenTEAM, we wanted to you know, measure our nutrient density in our food. And so we on boarded as a growing partner with the bio nutrient Institute. And to my surprise, I didn't know that this was the case but SurveyStack and FFAR in the last for integrated with the biometry Institute, a suite of technology that FarmOS had created. And so the the everything that everyone here is collaborating, collaborating on and and using is presenting itself in areas where I wasn't even expecting to and then it made our collaboration with the binary tree Institute super seamless, because the information that we were putting into our SurveyStack uploaded to our farm LS account that we already had. And so just knowing that I'm like the backend, all of the people in the technology and the people creating the protocols are working together. It really helps us on the ground, just making like helping collect their data and using it in a practical way.
Oh I'm never forget, one of my favorite authors is James rebounds. And I'll never forget he said every, every farmer needs an ecologist and every ecologist needs. But this is kind of like as a farmer, you've got multiple scientists and developers working for you. So
it's true. Exactly.
This with people as well and right, because I find continuous that people are wanting, but then there's the technology, which is the overview and maybe that determines where you can start taking us into this because it's not easy, right? Like we argue about these methods, how we want to apply them. You know, what I want to do as working in arable system in the UK is very different what shaylen wants to do, and so how do you manage that process? I mean, with maybe you can give us a quick overview of how your your new SurveyStack library works. And how you've managed those kinds of complexities.
Sure, yeah. So I'm just I think people have heard the term SurveyStack quite a bit but I don't know if I've actually anybody's to find it. So So SurveyStack is an open source data collection. platform that we developed a few years ago. I was so it's just a, you know, a survey platform that we've been building upon with a lot of support from the OpenTEAM community. I couldn't I can't thank OpenTEAM Enough for for that. So the question is, that library really is exactly what it sounds like. It is just some questions that you can then drag and drop into a survey, which seems really simple except to your point actually, there's a lot of complexity and a lot of thought and quite a few arguments that go into deciding how to design it. But the first thing is that your every community wants to work slightly differently, right? Like they have slightly different goals. So if you tried to make a survey and ask 100 groups to use a survey, they'll be like, but I need this question. I need this question and you know, the conversation breaks down. So how can you kind of merge those competing needs of wanting something that standard to Sharon's point that like, let's use because this is about soil health measurements, a water infiltration measurement, simple thing you can do in the field, like two minutes. So how can you codify that? So everybody uses the exact same protocol has the same data names, everything's really nice and interoperable. But everybody else can still ask all of their own custom questions and do all the other stuff that they want to do. And so, you know, that's where something like SurveyStack you create your own survey and Shaelyn Kunzang Caney fork or any collaborative you work with. These are the six questions I need to ask. And then I'm going to go over here to the questions that library I'm just gonna drop this whole set in and in this set, because, you know, people are gonna want to know if I pull it in, like shaman doesn't want to just grab any water infiltration measurement, like is it a good one who made it? Do they know what the heck they're talking about? I don't know. Right? So you know, we provide a space for all of that. Transparency and metadata. This is what this question says meant to be used for right? This is who developed it. Here's the links and references to the to the underlying methodologies in the peer reviewed research. Here are the people who are maintaining it. Here's the version history here are all of the updates that's happened. But again, it seems like a lot but it allows them someone to have confidence to say, Yeah, this methodology makes sense. It's grounded in the science. There's a lot of people using it, I can see what's happening. And so now I can interact with this and have confidence it's the right thing. Another piece that we we've worked on, you know, again, sticking with like the water infiltration, there's like eight different methodologies that can be really close together. And so the one piece is just being able to codify methods, everybody can use it. The next step is how do you get people to agree to all use the same one, when there can be a very good reason why in my circumstance, maybe this one's better my circumstance, this one's better, and is one of the tools that we're going to roll out this spring that I'm really excited about is what we call a farmer's coffee shop, which is really a peer to peer benchmarking service where you can take them the outcomes from these question sets, and then you can compare yourself to everybody else in the community that's using it. So then an individual grower says, oh, okay, I can use this protocol that nobody else is using. I get to the coffee shop. I'm comparing it against myself last night. Interesting. Well, I really learned from there. But if I use this other method that 12 organizations are using that hundreds of growers are completing every year. Now I can enter this this peer to peer benchmarking in this kind of social media tool that we're developing and really compare myself to them. And get those outcomes. It helped me understand soil health measurements, right? Like, soil measurements aren't always easy to interpret. So we're going from a lot of the processes that Chelsea and shaylen have talked about, about all the conversations that go into choosing a protocol that we're doing, to how to codify it to how to actually get a lot of people the community to benefit from using it.
I add something on there real quick.
Yeah, I was actually gonna ask you, Oh, yeah. Go for it.
Yeah. I mean, what Dan is describing is just really wonderful because there's, um, you know, historically agricultural research and data gathering has really kind of existed so much in the realm of, you know, it's done by universities or maybe extension or, you know, with high intensity experiments done on in a few locations and then extrapolating those results to large landscape. What Dan and Chelsea and Jalen are doing is really building the ecosystem so that you can actually gather high quality data from a huge amount of geographies and, and cement and aggregate that data and to generate even even more broad insights that in a way that really wasn't possible before. And I think that, you know, just just the ability to understand how different landscapes have different terrain, how different biochar or climatic conditions influences influence agriculture. In addition, in addition to many management practices, that's something that we're kind of just getting into at this day and age. And I think it's really exciting that farmers can actually be participating in that research and that the generation of information in a really democratized way so
I'll never forget having that conversation with you, Patrick. Well, we were debating in one of the OpenTEAM meetings, something as simple as bulk density, you dig it up a certain volume and you weigh it, and I will never forget having that. I mean, because that's the other side of this right is like Chelsea and Chairman saying that standardize and there's that element of well actually, we have thought about what to do if you have a lot of rocks in your soil, and how to translate it into a nutrient density. But Chelsea, I think you look like you have something you wanted to say.
Yeah, no, I would just want to Yeah, sort of build on what you're saying Ashlyn, which is that we've thought through and tried to build into these, the monitoring framework through the carbon series, sort of on the front end this this flexibility even though there are sort of, you know, Pete components, right, where we're, throughout these decisions that folks make in the monitoring framework, they're, they're standardized, but there's, if you the way that we've designed it right now is that somebody can come in and create sort of a fit for purpose monitoring, and within each of those steps, and they're standardized recommendations for how to do choice A or choice B, but you do have that choice. of choice A and B. And so we have essentially a tiered scoring system to capture all of these decisions that folks can make on the front end. Be in in idea here is that yeah of rancher in, you know, central coast of California might have very different I think, you know, context and desires and needs, who's you know, maybe participate in the healthy souls program here, then somebody in Colorado who has, you know, a completely different context and desire for the monitoring. And so, what we've done is we've had different steps along this process. We've said okay, here here's a decision point for you think through are you going to which indicators are you going to monitor or which are you going to stratify or not? And so then throughout that, folks can generate essentially something that fits their purpose and I think in doing so, will, my hope is that the protocols will be more widely useful and be able to be adopted and you can imagine like a program like restore California or something like this, where it's an incentive program can come in and say, Well, okay, yes, there's all this flexibility in here. We want participants who are monitoring for restore California to follow this roadmap, using the framework. For we want them to have this score like this score. or above in terms of inference and the score isn't about how well you're doing from an outcome standpoint, the score is really about communicating and understanding the level of inference that your monitoring is giving your monitoring decisions are giving you so I just wanted to highlight that that front of the front end. We are thinking a lot about how you build in standardization, but also flexibility. So that so that it can be used across all these different contexts.
I think because we'll move on to the questions now. But I think that's actually an excellent point to end it is that we really have ended up building something. I say I've contributed us most and most the hardware is both flexible and standardized. And I think that is the amazing thing that's come out of all of this, but I'm gonna say flexible, standardized, and then there's the network of people around it, which also I think just being able to have those one to one conversations outside of the group even is really useful. But thank you for that all. I've got quite a few questions yet. And I'm being pointed to a few. So actually, that's a good place to start. So, for the first question, someone who is doesn't sound like knows the work of OpenTEAM particularly well, and maybe you can take this one down is are there defined interface protocols, for example, measuring data, data storage, that kind of thing? Yeah,
I wouldn't say there's defined protocols for data storage, but there are a lot of discussions happening around the idea of standardized data schemas or conventions to say okay, even if you're collecting a for just give an example a set of management data like tillage or you know, fertilizer amendments that when you store that data, it's following a consistent schema whether you're sir, you're collecting the SurveyStack or you're putting it directly into FarmOS ls a couple of the tool chains that have been mentioned or others so that regardless of how it goes in it can be used consistently, once it's there.
And I think this is something I've actually chatted a lot to Mike about is because I mean also touches on the idea of ontologies. Right? How are you labeling with data? And even that you'd be amazed how flexible you have to be. So yeah, um, so going on from that. Then the next question coming up is how useful are soil carbon comparisons between affirm a farm sorry, versus on the same farm from year to year? And Chelsea said that she will take that one and then maybe you can also comment on that. Patrick, if you if you're happy.
Yeah, I mean, I think my initial reaction to a question like that, which is great is that it depends on the question, and it depends on decisions around your monitoring approach. And maybe that's not satisfactory, but that's that's where my mind first goes. And so I think comparison between farms, you know, if you only have one time, one time point can be really important. It can help you understand sort of where you're at from a single, like baseline sampling. For instance, if you're able to track change over time. And let's say it's, you don't have controls, something that a network or sort of between farm stance can do is it can help you to under sort of, try to tease apart what's like, environmental or climactic in terms of change over time versus what's due to management on your property. So it adds these data points to be able to try to understand if your management is having a signal compared to you know, what might be going on more broadly, like drought or something like that in the region. And so having that between foreign comparison there over time can be helpful. But of course, it does depend on your on your questions, as well. And I think there's decisions there from a monitoring and protocol standpoint, that can make between farm comparisons versus on the same farm year to year more or less useful.
I think this is something that you've done especially well, in Quick Carbon series work. I think it's coming out really nicely, Patrick, I mean,
yeah, I mean, I think Chelsea pretty much nailed it. It's, it is really dependent on what information you're seeking to get. The only other thing I might add is I can see Jeff Harris on the call, so I better isn't that yeah, you know, the farm to farm comparisons can be tricky just because each different type has a different you know, a different background level of soil carbon and a different potential for changing carbon. So I'm making generalizations in soil types, the general rule is it needs to be treated with a lot of caution. So
um, so then the next the next question I have again, soil carbon is obviously a popular topic here for obvious reasons. So whereas OpenTEAM in measuring soil carbon sequestration for pasture land, Cool Farm Tool doesn't have a module for pasture. In that treating land as a note from a carbon sequestration perspective, and then, in terms of reporting from carbon sequestration and food from farms over food companies, we need to track and report on carbon and pasture so I have to be honest, I'm an arable scientist and not entirely sure. So again, I'm going to shoot that back to you, Patrick, Chelsea, and maybe even shaylen You have something to say about that one.
Yeah, I made a phone pass here to Chelsea so. So I mean, I passion measuring changes in soil carbon is always challenging. It's especially it's especially challenging in pastures, particularly when there's a lot of, you know, a lot of topographic variability in western rangelands, especially where there's differences in microclimate. So I think, you know, there's been a lot of interest, or I've certainly encountered a lot of interests in the last five years, especially in understanding the impacts of different grazing management on pasture in terms of soil carbon, but um, you know, based upon my conversation, you know, what I've seen and also in conversations with people like Chelsea is just that even, you know, with some fairly rigorous measurement protocols can be up to discern the differences between different different treatments. So, I think that's my roundabout way of saying, I think there's a tendency to want to sort of not jump in there by tools such as the Cool Farm Tool, you predicting what changes in soil carbon will be from different pasture management just because it's it's fairly challenging to do and it's not I wouldn't say it's settled. chopping away like mighty take it from there.
Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Patrick. No, I would agree with what you've said. And, you know, and and, and just add that, you know, there are like, other tools like, you know, like, comment comment planter for the, you know, that supports lots of different things, but also the healthy souls program. They do. Differentiate between management practices on range land versus cropland, so there are some attempts to create greenhouses do some greenhouse gas, sort of estimations in there with management on rangelands, and you know what we're point blue we've, I mentioned this towards the beginning. We're monitoring in terms of actually tracking and reporting on carbon and pastures in I can speak to what we've been doing. So we monitor over 100 ranches across California right now in a standardized way. And this is different than the protocols we're developing where we've really in the past been focusing on sort of getting a pulse of the range, large so we'll choose sort of some points across the entire property that are representative, but randomly selected and try to just sort of gather some inference about sort of the state the state of the system and really there are power from a science standpoint, comes at scale. So we do have, you know, over 100, ranches that we're monitoring, we monitor anywhere between like four and 40 points per ranch. So, when you sort of do the math that, you know, m equals, you know, adds up to a number that I think is nothing you know, maybe nothing to sneeze at. And then with the carbon, the we're calling it the range C monitoring framework for that's meant to map on all of these practices. Our hope is to essentially do that is to be able to track and report and generate information that can feed back to, you know, Cool Farm Tool, other decision, you know, support tools like that like that rely on things like decent or other beat biogeochemical models, so that we can create better estimates for change over time. And, you know, in in, in like Patrick, I think alluded to in some cases, it may be that these practices have a very, very small signal, and that's just sort of the state that's just sort of the, you know, something that I think is good to know for, you know, in terms of incentivizing and prioritizing practices for carbon management. And
yeah, let's see, yeah, I think that the next question kind of follows on that. Someone who's asking that when they want estimate changes, and they're talking about soil health or time of which soil carbon is obviously an integral part, that actually consistency or comparability of their datasets is more important than accuracies. It sounds like they'd be hesitant changing their method, and then they're asking, so if you are encouraged to choose a new or better method, what kind of advice would you give? Do you have any tricks that you might be able to give to help them get round this kind of thing? I'm tempted to ask you salad because I don't know if you've ever actually had this problem. On farm. What were you doing before you with OpenTEAM?
Yeah, well, so we've been tracking our soil carbon at Kitty Brook Farm since 2019. And we've been working with the soil inventory project, which is actually how I started working at Canyon fork farms. I was a student with Chris Covey at Skidmore College, and he he's worked to create the soil inventory project and we've been we went around to pasture lands and farms. I was in the Hudson Valley and down here and taking soil carbon samples. And we were using a web application created by Charlie Benegal called the stratify web app. And that's how we did our sample site selection and we were choosing you know or selecting 1000s of samples per just a few 100 acres of land, um, for our sampling to sort of just give us a baseline and really know exactly how much carbon we had in our land. But that's not something that we're going to continue to do. We're not going to take 1000s of samples every year. Really just working on figuring out what is the minimum amount of samples we can take to continue to take the to understand, representatively how much soil carbon we have. So I wouldn't say that we've changed the way that we take our soil carbon as much as we continue to, you know, figure out what is more efficient and what is the better way to continue to take representative samples. So I haven't run into that issue. Exactly. But you know, we do modify the way that we're sampling and still and still coming across results that are representative and then we also we also take soil health just using what Woods end laboratory and this is actually something that might that might help answer. The question is we have soil carbon results that we tip took using a method of stratify and then we take soil health results using an aggregation of 10 samples per field. And I'm right now working on figuring out if if those results are showing us the same thing. And so maybe I'm in the same boat as the person that asked this question. Try and find out what what is. Yeah, which one to end up doing. To continue to do?
Well, I think you've highlighted it's a massive issue. It's a huge investment of time and money. And that I think is where both Dan and Chelsea this flexibility aspect comes in because you've built that in to both the tool for you then and the protocol for you to see where hopefully, it would you could find a method within our methods that was semi comparable, if you wanted to change, although it's a bit difficult, not knowing exactly what the method is. Okay. Then. Can any of the panelists comment on how the tools have been used to identify farmland Mike, this is one of my favorite topics be produced better environmental results. If a field was converted from row crops to speciality crops. I like thinking of this in the UK it's nothing in terms of like biodiversity function versus should you grow crops tall, but let's go with from root crops to speciality crops.
I guess it's a tools type question. I think I could try
to give a shot I mean yeah, I mean, it's it's really hard to generalize an answer to this. You know, I don't think there's there's nothing you know, specialty crops aren't inherently, you know, they there's nothing to say that they should be more or less environmentally beneficial than growing crops are environmentally harmful than Robocop either either way. So I think you know, a lot of the things that it's going to come down to is, you know, what are the specific practices that are used to cultivate those row crops versus the specialty crop? You know, what, how much how much is the soil disturbed? Is it just one you know, more broadly like, is it just one grown in monoculture? Are there multiple species being intermingled within the thing visual areas? You know, what are the buffers from the riparian zones and my finger pie so, um, you know, I think some schools have, you know, there's some people that have mowed situations that I've seen have been focused on on carbon and GHGs. But I think we're increasingly seeing a focus or, you know, interest in biodiversity. You know, for example, that Cool Farm Tool does have the biodiversity module and water usage. And then there's other tools out there that are working or organizations out there working on that as well. Disturbance market coercion, and I know that I think Dan has a bunch more questions than that or that people have been working on related to those other ecosystem services as well. So that's my that's my answer without actually answering the question.
It's a it's a tricky one, but I think I'm gonna I'm gonna end it there. I think because actually, there's i Oh, okay. Sorry.
From the toolchain perspective, I wanted to say that like, this is a question that we know the community is interested in so has we're building out like the farmers coffee shop. Some of the indicators that we want to include are things like environmental indicators and so anybody who's coming into the coffee shop has a producer would have the the space to choose what they consider the most important you know, you know, goals from a farm level, one farmer may be all about your kind of real kind of risk aversion, another person could be profit, another person can be environmental benefits, and then we'll have we can have indicators that are specific to that, like, you know, days of living cover, which I think is one that Patrick just mentioned, or, you know, so it was the other one it just slipped up my mind like diversity of cover crop species, like the number of species so these things can all be kind of operationalized within the kind of the data collection tools so that you can compare yourself to others who, hey, they they have more data living cover, does that lead to better other environmental impacts that are important to me?
I mean, so I'm gonna I can go down and 100 stone but I was reading the Nate's pick the other day about you and cyber culture. I'm British. So it was insightful for me about how you pick you know, which land should you be rewilding, which bits should you be turning over to row crops and where should you be keeping your capital? And I feel like actually, that's the great thing about this methods group is we're really getting in the detail. It really is about kind of building the methods in the community to answer those kinds of questions. So on that note, I think I'm going to hand it back to you, Dawn.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And what a pleasure to hear from the community members today and a skilled and curious group and all of the participants who've joined us here today to explore and problem solve together. So it was our goal. Today to not just provide content, but also sort of a sense of community and how we work together and how we do what we do and really also to welcome you to connect and to contribute your efforts and add your efforts into this. That as an individual or as an organization because as you can see, it's both meaningful and also at times a real joy. So I really want to emphasize that this is this is part of the process. And so with deep gratitude for all of our panelists, and just the amazing skill that they brought together here and over the months and years that have gone into this already, so please keep the questions coming. Reach out to the panelists directly, you'll see some links in terms of ways to engage I know we have some requests for get lab links and things like that. That will also be should be in the chat or if not make sure that we get that to you will be posted on the website. So you know, please join us for our as we continue this ag tech ecosystem series and the upcoming webinars you can register for others at the website. Also find our our updated progress report. And sign up for the monthly newsletter or in orientation. There are lots of ways to get involved and so we really hope that you will and I guess one last thing is that I believe that we're going to have a little bit of a coffee time at post. So look for the link for to join the panelists and an informal conversation immediately after this. That's something we're also trying to do so you look for the link for that. It'll be a difference in weight. And with that, again, with deep gratitude to everybody. Thank you all for joining and we really look forward to seeing you again really soon. Thank you Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you all. Good stuff alright. Leftover Yes. See you there.
