 Hi, this is Hossup Nupathya and today we have with us once again Sumar Johal, Executive Director of AgStack. Talk a bit about what is Foundation doing, what is the state of the Foundation doing? We've made great strides in the last two years since we launched AgStack. We have two major projects that are now generally available. Asset Registry is one of them that is funded by the German government. And the other one is around Weather Server which is about to be launched at the heels of Asset Registry. So these foundational projects are what we started AgStack to do when we started it, which is to build this neutral and open and secure and vendor neutral digital infrastructure for food and agriculture. And we're now well on that journey. Several large organizations have adopted it just yesterday and today. We have some folks from MIT and the World FAO organization at the United Nations talk about our project and how they're bringing globe-scale field boundaries onto our project. So it's a really fantastic journey thus far, but we're just getting started. We're at very early stages of this digital revolution. We also inked a massive, very meaningful memorandum of understanding MOU with CGIAR, which is a consortium of research institutions that are at the apex of research for food and ag globally. And they advise national agriculture universities and governments. They maintain gene banks for food and they're really ag first and we are digital first. And so both of us are open and neutral and in the public interest. And so we've partnered together and that was the MOU. We inked with them. We're going to be doing lots of things with them. And I'm very, very excited about that partnership. And there are many other things we did along the way, which have really cemented the need, the use and the benefit of AgStack as a digital public good for accelerating innovation in food and agriculture at globe scale. So we've been very busy. When we look at your space, it's kind of different from CNCF, right? Because everybody is doing technologies today. So what kind of challenges, you know, when you look at, you know, AgStack Foundation where you're like, I mean, there is a lot of hurdles, you know, education awareness. So what are you seeing when you go out of the field? Hey, I mean, it's like greenfield. Yes, yes. Very good question. Yeah, you know, so one of the things that, you know, I think about is both the challenge and the opportunity, which are two sides of the same coin of that question. So let me talk a little bit about the opportunity first and then I'll talk about the challenge. I think the opportunity is that when you think about, you know, think about some some 14 year old kid in a village in Africa or in India or in Brazil. Somewhere in the global south. And if you ask that child, that boy or girl, hey, you know, do you care about Kubernetes or do you care about cloud computing? They may not be able to tell you yes or no. But if you ask them, do you care about food? You care about water? I think those answers will be yes. So I think it's a very meaningful topic that engages half the world's labor force, globally, and consumes 70% of all fresh water on the planet and feeds us all, right? And it's a massive need for digital transformation. There's a lot of leakage in the value chain. So I think the opportunity is massive. It was massive when we launched AgStack. The more I get into it, the more I see those opportunities, whether it be on fertilizer management or whether it be on financial services and land loans for farmers or whether it be in carbon credits, which is one of the things that we'll talk about. You know, there's so many opportunities for digital innovation that I'm thrilled that the Linux Foundation is actually doing something about it and I'm thrilled to be leading that charge. I'm really delighted. It's a life. It's an opportunity of a lifetime. So I think that's one opportunity wise and I could talk all day about that, of course. But let's talk about the challenge to answer your question. There's no doubt that this is not Linux Foundation's core focus, right? There's no doubt about that. So why am I here? I think the reason why I'm here from the Linux Foundation perspective is that Linux has traditionally done very horizontal tech savvy projects. But it's starting to realize that actually to really make an impact in the world, Linux needs to package those projects together in a way that can create disruptions for entire industries. So that's where automotive grade Linux happened. That's where the open source foundation for special effects in Hollywood happened. That's where LF energy happened. That's where Finos happened. Those are all industry specific disruptions that are basically non horizontal. They're vertical. So agriculture is something hadn't happened. And so until I came along and we both saw eye to eye. So it's really a reinvention or I would say a pivot for Linux Foundation to kind of make itself more, you know, useful for an industry. But then even beyond that, I think there is there are industries like FinTech and then the industries like agriculture, right? Very different industries, right? In agriculture, you have a very low level of digital competence. You have huge amount of number of people employed that really have never seen even any computing device besides their cell phone. And so you have a challenge beyond the typical industry ecosystem challenges. And they're, you know, bringing in members, for example, maybe a second step. Maybe the first step is bringing in grants and governments. And that's what we've been doing to catalyze this virtuous cycle that Linux is known for where we can help enable private sector to accelerate innovation. That's what we are trying to do in agriculture. But perhaps the catalyst of that can be some grant funding. So we've been challenged by how much membership dollars we can raise from private sector in agriculture. But it's been offset by the need from governments and from other philanthropic institutions and donors to actually make that digital public good a reality. And so it's really a big challenge for Linux because it's outside of their sandbox. But I give credit to the leadership team of which I'm part of to really take this head on and really delve into sustainability, impact, livelihoods at scale that is unprecedented. A few days ago I was talking to a company that they're like, they are into meat production. Yeah. And they have clients like Tyson and everywhere. And they were talking about the challenges that these firms had. That's right. Because they're like, you know, we are a big field. That's right. And there is no connectivity here. So how they're using private privacy network and a lot of small IoT based technologies to be able to not only track those, but they said we have to also, you know, there are a lot of human rights issues out there. That's right. So the thing is that the pain points are there. Absolutely. But we need an organization like yours. Yes. But you know, it's, but the field is sort of chicken in the egg. Yes. It is absolutely true. And just so, you know, to sort of harp on that one point, I think that these organizations not only are trying to disrupt, they have very thin margins. They don't have much money. And so, you know, food has to be affordable. And so these organizations don't have the kind of buffered, you know, general, you know, gross margins that that normal other tech businesses do. And so because of that, it's even more difficult for them to put out money for open source. But I will say that they have all realized that the only way to actually improve their capital efficiency to improve their time to market, to improve their cost to market, they must use open source if it exists. So I think it's a foregone conclusion. I think it will, it will happen. It's happening already. It just takes longer. Earlier, you're talking mentioned, you know, that you'll talk, also talk about the carbon credits. So before we started the discussion, we talked about field carbon model project is there. I also want to talk about that also because that when we talk about agriculture, we also talk about environment before you had a guest from open you can, she was also talking about sustainability which is about the environment as well. Yes. So talk about this project. What was the origin of this project? Yeah. So I think the origin really comes from the fact that agriculture provides not just a challenge to climb for climate change because agriculture uses such carbon heavy products, but also solution because plants through photosynthesis actually sequester carbon dioxide. And in fact, as plant production grows, more and more CO2 is sequestered by the plants for creating food. So it's actually a carbon sink as well. So now what kind of, you know, practices can happen where we take what is otherwise from a carbon perspective could be a challenge, a problem where you're deforesting something and bringing agriculture there, your carbon sink is changing to something that actually becomes a solution where you actually grow plants in a way that they're net carbon sequesters and actually more and more carbon through the plant is stored in the soil. So that's where the conversation really starts. Can we make agriculture a net carbon sequester? And one of the free market ideas that has come and become quite popular lately is this notion of carbon markets for agriculture. And, you know, the idea behind being if you can quantify the net carbon savings that happen through changes in practices, changes in crops or what have you, then those net offsets can then be sold and that could actually provide sold to carbon polluters and those can provide a net new income stream for farmers. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine a farmer today who's barely able to make a living selling wheat or corn or what have you. Suddenly they're able to multiply their income two, three times because they're able to also sell carbon because they're growing that wheat or corn a certain way. So that's the idea, right? Well, there are two big challenges with that idea that we are trying to solve at Agstack. First is in order for farmers to use some methodology, it has to be transparent. It cannot be locked up as proprietary code. People have to know what it is. The science has to be transparent. And so what we are trying to do first is really convene the world's consortium of scientists around some preexisting intellectual property, which is already an open source. And kind of evolve that, like Linux often does, like code, evolve that to be a transparent standard because transparency is very important. If somebody is going to buy something, they want to know what it is that they're buying and the methodology has to be transparent. So that's one big challenge is transparency. And the second big challenge is cost. If it takes an inordinate amount of cost to actually do this at a field level and we're talking billions of fields across the globe, you can't really have a scale around a carbon market if that's the case. So how do you bring scale and cost, sort of their two sides of the same coin, into a meaningful way, an affordable way so that everybody can do it? And I think both those objectives are what we're trying to achieve through the field carbon project. So field carbon project is an open source sub-project of Agstak. We are just launching this Friday, a technical convening starting with the first ever actual field carbon model in code, which we have actually coded with scientists in Python and which will be available for all to see and leverages the NASA SMAP project that has been going on since 2006. So NASA has built a project using satellite data to create a net ecosystem exchange carbon flux product at a 9 kilometer grid. And that product is called a SMAP product is going to be used as a starting point, but we're going to take that 9 kilometer grid and make it field specific. So how do we make that field specific by getting satellite data and sensor data and activity data on a field digitizing those through various tool sets and bringing them together into a model that can then compute the model's net ecosystem exchange of carbon flux per unit time so that people can see whether carbon is net sequestered or net emitted over a period of time. And by doing it in this way, we are unlocking both those challenges I mentioned earlier. First, by making the product that the model completely open source, we not only set the standard, which is already being used by NASA, but we all also convene scientists through our convenings to say, if you think this should be improved, why don't you improve it? Right? Imagine the world's scientists all collaborating on not one, but two, but thousands of different climate models all are version controlled. All can have a very good audit trail and that's what Linux Foundation knows how to do, right? So that's I think the first piece, but the second piece is we're leveraging remote sensing and digital stacks and open source so that the cost of doing this becomes very affordable, right? Almost zero. And that's a game changer right there. So that's the objective of this and the panel on Friday we're actually going to walk through the model. We're going to showcase some of the early results on some few fields and actual fields in the U.S. And we're hoping and pretty convinced that the whole world will rally around and build this to create a scientific consensus around the model itself and then be able to demonstrate its validity for actual ground carbon flux in different areas and in different continents and countries. Who is involved with this stage? Yeah, so we have about we put out an open invitation for the world scientists on LinkedIn or the social media sites on our website and we got about 20 or so scientists from all over the world to partner with us, including folks from CGIR, our partners who already are the world scientists around agriculture and food, right? So we already have a partnership, but we made it open, not just limited to those partners. So we have about 20 or so people who volunteered who are all PhDs in remote science, sensing or soil physics or carbon physics and are have decades of experience each coming to the table and saying, I'm pretty excited and they're from all over the world. They're from India. They're from the U.S. They're from Kenya. They're from Egypt. They're from all over the place, all over the world, which we're delighted about. So we will be forming a technical advisory committee from those folks. The TSE is being led by Jerry Hatfield who spent 40 years at the USDA and we'll have a video from him at our Friday convening and he's done a lot of work in agronomy but also remote sensing and he's a fantastic person to lead it and John Kimball who leads the laboratory for SMAP at the University of Montana for NASA. They maintain the code base and so John Kimball and his research scientist Arthur Ensley are the ones who are basically the co-chairs of this TSE. So essentially that's how we're organizing it, which again is consistent with how Linux does all the governance, right? This is sort of the sandbox of governance that Linux provides and that's why we're in a unique position to pull this off because we have the tools to create that governance. You're talking about the cost, it brings the cost on us. And when we talk about some of those industries or the market, first of all they are not as again tech sector, you know. They know how to deal with the vendor. They know how to get a throat to choke. So when we look at this market, how do you see the evolution or you can say the commercialization of these technologies so that once again commercialization is what makes it cost effective? Otherwise, dealing with open source is actually very, very costly. Of course. So talk about what vision you have for that. Sure, of course. And that's the exciting part is that I think by building the model in open source, we're going to unlock the entire private sector, all the cloud computing companies to take this model, compute it on their cloud, all the companies that are partnered with the cloud computing companies or their own cloud, they may have their own private cloud where they can simply put a computer, take the model and get the data to compute the model for field scale and not have to defend the scientific rigor it takes to defend that my model is an actual accurate model. They just have to compute it. Think about it this way. When Linux kernel was invented, right, what was Red Hat versus Linux business model in the first order? Linux made the operating system for free. Red Hat hosted it. Period. Now there were a few other things on top, of course, that they built up, but essentially a hosted environment for open source project is something that's a tried and tested thing that everybody does. Kubernetes is the same way, right? All companies use Kubernetes. It's an open source project, so they don't have to maintain the code. So we're going to maintain the model. We're going to maintain the framework. Any private sector company can basically use it and start their own carbon supply. Essentially, they can create own carbon markets. So by doing so, we take the burden off of them for having to defend the efficacy of the scientific basis behind this. And instead, they can focus all their energy on the commercial focus, which is why it's a call to all companies like who are aspiring to be carbon market players to come join us as members. Push this out, get this faster out in the market so that you can make money. That's short and very simple. And that's what Linux does. Every project, that's the design. And since you talked about these players and also a lot of improvement, but progress has been made in the edge computing. Of course. So because when you talk about something which is in the field, 5G and all the satellite, I mean, the right technology stacks are getting in place to help your projects to help that vision which is absolutely what you need and the players and these are like commercial players. These are not for charity, you know, products. And one of the key things here is that it's, you mentioned sort of having a chokehold or having a moat as they call it in proprietary software. I think that can still exist as people bundle other proprietary services around a core open source model. So commercial open source is a very COS is a very known design principle in regular tech. I think agriculture companies are learning about it still. And as they learn more about it and we can hope to accelerate that learning for them, I think this is basically free money for them in some ways. I mean, this is the fastest way they can make money and not have to maintain the underlying code base. When I look at the people when they say commercial versus open source, I'm like, that's not open source is like cooking. Yes. Okay. Yes. But commercialization is Uber Eats. Yes. Restaurant. Yes. Abbas. So it's not open source versus open source is just a collaborative model where how we can work together to write this code. Red Hat, Sousa, Canonical, AWS, Intel. They're not commercializing open source. So there's no open source versus, you know, so. Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned Kubernetes. Look at the ecosystem. So big. So many companies are there. That's how I expect AgStack to be. I expect AgStack to be the Kubernetes of the agriculture ecosystem. There is literally no friction between the commercialization and actually open source. I feel that I may buy it because also no open source. Generally, open source enables more commercialization. That's right. It accelerates. You don't have to write all the code. That's right. The recipe is there. All you have to do is, hey, how you can deliver that chai or lassi or coffee in the way your users want. Absolutely. You know, I mean, in all fairness, what will end up happening is there'll be a few early winners, right? And they will lead the market in showing how you can create a billion dollar exit or what have you. With commercial open source. And that's what happened with Zendesk and with MongoDB and a bunch of these guys. And I think that once that starts to happen in AgStack and that day is coming because horizontally locked silo data systems in agriculture will never scale. There's too many stakeholders that need to all participate and collaborate in this sort of dance we call agriculture, right? So it just will have to happen and it's going to happen. And the beauty which is happening here versus other industries is that since it's part of a neutral foundation, they don't have to worry about code getting logged by a company changing the license, you know? Absolutely. It's all permissively licensed. Yeah, it's all permissively licensed from the very beginning. We are Apache 2.0 and CDLA version 2.0 in all our open source and open data projects. And so it is a very, you know, licensed and very friendly way to encourage actually private sector actors to use the code. Yeah, because when you give some examples, you know, some of those companies, they own their own open source. Of course. But they can change the license tomorrow and suddenly everybody is logged on. So all the right pieces are in place. Sumer, thank you so much for once again sitting down with me and also in person and talk about, you know, of course, AgStack and also a lot of projects that you folks are working on. And as usual, I would love to have you on the show again. Thank you. Thank you, Swapna for having me. It's always exciting to talk with you and I'm delighted to get the time. Thank you.