Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Agriculture Infrastructure Project

'The Linux Foundation has lifted the lid on a new open source digital infrastructure project aimed at the agriculture industry,' reports VentureBeat:

The AgStack Foundation, as the new project will be known, is designed to foster collaboration among all key stakeholders in the global agriculture space, spanning private business, governments, and academia.

As with just about every other industry in recent years, there has been a growing digital transformation across the agriculture sector that has ushered in new connected devices for farmers and myriad AI and automated tools to optimize crop growth and circumvent critical obstacles, such as labor shortages. Open source technologies bring the added benefit of data and tools that any party can reuse for free, lowering the barrier to entry and helping keep companies from getting locked into proprietary software operated by a handful of big players...

The AgStack Foundation will be focused on supporting the creation and maintenance of free and sector-specific digital infrastructure for both applications and the associated data. It will lean on existing technologies and agricultural standards; public data and models; and other open source projects, such as Kubernetes, Hyperledger, Open Horizon, Postgres, and Django, according to a statement.

'Current practices in AgTech are involved in building proprietary infrastructure and point-to-point connectivity in order to derive value from applications,' AgStack executive director Sumer Johal told VentureBeat. 'This is an unnecessarily costly use of human capital. Like an operating system, we aspire to reduce the time and effort required by companies to produce their own proprietary applications and for content consumers to consume this interoperably.'

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