Open Source for Farmers. Linux Foundation launches AgStack initiative

The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims for massive innovation through Open Source, has launched the AgStack Foundation, the world’s first free technology stack for the agricultural ecosystem.

The AgStack Foundation aims to improve the global efficiency of agriculture on the planet by creating and supporting free, versatile and open tools for agricultural and data processing applications. This includes opsensive robots, free software and more. All of this can take global agriculture to a whole new level.

AgStack founders and sponsors include technology and agricultural market leaders from a variety of sectors, including Digital Green, FarmOS, HPE, IBM and a number of American universities.

FarmOS is a web-based farm management and planning application. Created by a community of farmers, scientists, and programmers with input from several companies

“The global agricultural ecosystem is in dire need of a digital upgrade. There’s an extreme lack of productivity and innovation there because of the lack of universal tools and data. The foundation will help create those tools,” said Samer Joal, executive director of AgStack.

AgStack’s official announcement notes that people are currently losing 33% of their crops and 9% of the world’s population is hungry or malnourished due to lack of technology. Proprietary technologies are inefficient and their adoption is too slow. Digital infrastructure for the 21st century must be based on an efficient open stack.

AgStack contains an open repository for creating and publishing models, a free and easy mechanism of access to public data, universal frameworks that can be simultaneously used in different projects, and highly specialized extensions and toolkits. The stack supports existing c/o standards (AgGateway, UN-FAO, CAFA, USDA and NASA-AR), public data formats (Landsat, Sentinel, NOAA and Soilgrids), models (UC-ANR IPM) and free software such as Hyperledger, Kubernetes, Open Horizon, Postgres, Django etc.

FarmOS and other projects can rely on this free technology stack.