Deadline: January 23, 2018

The Commodity Automation by Rail and Truck (CART) project is a joint development effort of AgGateway's Precision Ag Council and Grain and Feed Council. It aims to provide grain traceability from field to fork by creating new standards and providing enhancements to existing standards as deemed necessary.  

This Call for Participation in a 2018 Proof-of-Concept will build on the 2014 and 2017 PoC efforts related to commodity transfer from source container to target containers, duration of the transfer, and method of the transfer. Prior PoCs used Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to pair containers with an Internet of Things (IoT) approach. Changes have been proposed to the AgXML standard which will result in a new release (version 5.0), which will at minimum include a new message called TransferEvent and a bundling of one or more of these TransferEvents into the existing CommodityMovement message under an element named RelatedTransferEvents.

This Proof of Concept aims to validate whether these changes can by implemented by various parties, including AgGateway Allied Providers and other member companies into and out of their business applications / Enterprise Resource Planning systems. We are seeking AgGateway member companies to participate in the PoC, committing development resources to create application adapters to either ingest the CommodityMovement message for grain receipts or export the CommodityMovement message for grain deliveries. Member companies should be aware that this is a beta version of the AgXML v5.0 standard that is compliant with the Naming and Design Rules. There may be changes to the TransferEvent and CommodityMovement messages after the completion and evaluation of the outcomes of the PoC. The need is for companies to provide subject matter experts and developers only, no funding will be required from participants in the PoC.

Anticipated benefits of this PoC include:

1. Efficiency improvements in the grain receiving process as a result of the receipt of shipment information into the respective business application(s) prior to the physical arrival of the grain,
2. Ability to review weights and grade of a specific shipment prior to arrival, as well has last load (what) and relate container cleaning event (who, when, how).
3. Automatic identification of grain transport containers upon the arrival of the shipment using BLE or RFID identification, with the potential of immediate retrieval of the shipment information.
4. Enabling identification of grain elevator/ processor load out bin into each shipping container (e.g., rail car or semi-trailer), enabling the traceability goals of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).
5. Elimination of paper documents and file cabinets as warranted.

It should be noted that this phase of the Proof-of-Concept will not include the grain movement within an elevator. Future work may include recommendations for use of IoT technology and Programmable Logic Controller / Process Control/ Historian guidelines to better record and monitor grain movement from bin-to-bin, dryer-to-bin, blending operations, etc.

Please respond as follows, indicating whether your system will receive or produce the CommodityMovement message:

• Interest in participating: Member.Services@AgGateway.org
• Questions about the PoC: Scott Nieman, Land O'Lakes at stnieman@landolakes.com
• Questions about AgGateway membership (or any other questions): Member.Services@AgGateway.org

Responses are due by January 23, 2018.

Link to AgGateway Traceability Working Group

Grain & Feed Council Wiki

You must be a member to access some areas of the Wiki. Contact Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org for more information.

I want to get involved!