Aaron Ault to Deliver Keynote at University of Minnesota Crop Pest Management Course

MINNEAPOLIS - Nov. 5, 2014 - PRLog -- Aaron Ault, Project Lead at the Open Ag Data Alliance (OADA), will be delivering the keynote presentation on December 10^th at the 2014 University of Minnesota Crop Pest Management Short Course (http://www.extension.umn.edu/agriculture/ag-professionals/cpm/). The Crop Pest Management Short Course is a three-day program held each December in conjunction with the Minnesota Crop Production Retailers Association Trade Show at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis. Aaron is a full time farmer based in Fulton County, Indiana and part time Senior Research Engineer working with Professors Jim Krogmeier and Dennis Buckmaster of the Open Ag Technology and Systems Group at Purdue University.

The goal of the University of Minnesota Extension Crop Pest Management (CPM) Short Course and the Minnesota Crop Production Retailers (MCPR) Trade Show is to educate and inform the key crop production decision-makers with quality research-based educational programs. The Short Course concurrent sessions include a wealth of pest, crop, and fertilizer management topics.

This program is targeted toward agronomists, sales people (seeds, crop protection products, and fertilizers), crop consultants, crop production specialists, regional and local extension educators, government agency personnel, farm managers, and anyone else who appreciates high-quality research-based professional training. The joint MCPR and U of M Extension program is now in its eighth year and offers agricultural professionals multiple educational opportunities and ample time for interaction with others.

The OADA community is building a set of open API’s for securely using data with the cloud. Anyone can use these API’s in their own cloud systems, and if they pass the same software tests as the open reference implementation, they will be considered technically compliant. The organization founded in America’s Heartland doesn't set for the privacy or sharing policies rather it supports clear understandings with stakeholders and the technical platform to support those agreed practices.

The OADA API is intended to serve as a specification for all providers that desire to be OADA compliant. This API does not attempt to define or enforce a single industry data standard. The goal of this API is to enable interoperability between the many precision Ag software systems and existing industry data types. By providing an extensible API that focuses on information exchange and facilitates data transformations an open heterogeneous environment that supports many legacy, current, and future data formats can be embraced. More information about OADA can be found at http://openag.io.