Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show. My next guest is a regular on the show. 0:17 He broadly defines infrastructure to include agriculture, natural, and urban environments. 0:24 His work involves creating new technologies, data sets, and computational models for sensing and sense-making in three different but often interconnected systems. 0:34 Please welcome Joshua Peschel, Assistant Professor of Agriculture and Biosystem Engineering at Iowa State University. Josh, welcome back to the show. Hi, Peggy. It's good to be with you this month. Josh, you know what? 0:48 You are here, you are here on show six hundred. We are celebrating our six hundredth show today. So you are with our milestone with us today. Wow. Congratulations. That's a, that's an amazing number. Yes. 1:03 And I couldn't be more excited to have you celebrate it with us today. So we've got lots to talk about. We're not only looking back, but we are looking forward. 1:11 So with looking forward, that's why we're looking at someone like you who's leading an open source initiative for precision livestock farming, and you can't talk about going forward with all this cool stuff than talk about what you are doing. 1:26 So, you know, talk to us about what that's all about because I think that's pretty s- cool when we talk about... 1:31 We first started the show talking about M to M in my first episode, six hundredth, when I first started in two thousand eight. Now we're talking forward with you leading open f- open initiative, open source initiatives. 1:42 You can't talk about more cooler stuff than that. Absolutely. And I, I'm really, really excited to be here to talk about this specific initiative. 1:50 So the big thing that we're kicking off for twenty nineteen is this notion of Open Livestock, which is really an open software platform that's gonna permit creativity and collaboration. 2:04 And what that does is allows us to grow this emerging field that we're pushing forward called precision animal science and engineering, and it's open so that we get the best people, whether they be computer scientists to biologists, animal scientists, veterinary medicine people, um, so that they can come in, contribute to new algorithm and, and ways to develop new machine learning, uh, to, to monitor and measure and make sense of what animals are doing, uh, in the production livestock system. 2:35 Uh, and it's gonna allow us to collect data that we've never had before to understand these problems so that we get to the big picture, which is how do we solve the billions of dollars that are happening in lost costs due primarily to, to animal health and not a good level of understanding, 2:54 so we can really improve the production processes that we have and really get to securing, uh, one of our main food sources. 3:03 So that's the, that's the initiative for Open Livestock, creating a community of people that can work together to develop a technology that allows us to do these kinds of things. 3:13 You know, it's an interesting point you make there, Josh, because when we talk the big picture items here, when we talk about smart ag or whatever, lost cost, you know, when we talk about a global society, waste is such an important part of this. 3:30 But when you think about what you can be doing here, when you talk about precision livestock farming, when you think about what you're trying to do, open source initiatives are so very important because in society today, everything's closed. 3:43 We kind of say we want to be open, but we still are... keep everything so closed-minded when we think about data and all these things. 3:51 When you talk about this, uh, initiative that you're trying to do, w- h- explain to us exactly how you're gonna go about doing this, and how does this fit into the bigger picture overall of what we think about agriculture? 4:07 How this is going to, you... H- how we can get everyone to buy into it, and how this is really going to help us really save money in the end, but really overall help us as a society? 4:20 Because the first thing that comes to mind to me, to me, is maybe we're going to ultimately help feed more people, and that's... If that's what you're gonna do, I'm all in. Then I'm all in. 4:31 Is that part of the big picture of what you're trying to do with this? It really is. 4:36 I think that food security is a, a big issue we should, we should all be concerned about, and dealing with operational costs that might be happening on the front end, because if you have animals that just don't make it out of the production process, that's a lot of sunk costs for people. 4:51 So you're securing both the supply, but you're also putting money back into people's pockets who are the ones who are sort of working oftentimes at the margin of, of producing a, a lot of this food. 5:03 And I think that we've, we, you know, I think technology-wise, we've been able to, to do this with a lot of our row crops, whether it be, uh, corn or, or sorghum for biofuels or things like that. 5:15 We put a lot of technology into doing this precision agriculture. Even for crops like wheat, we can drive harvesters very precisely to get every last kernel or grain that we wanna capture for production. 5:29 But we're not doing it in production livestock systems, and this is really an opportunity for us to do that and, and get to what you, what you s- first spoke about, which is really that food security, food stabilization issue. 5:43 So then help us understand who are the major players in this space, academic institutions, startups? 5:49 'Cause any succ- successful open source initiative needs to have a really good ecosystem, and you and I have had many conversations about this. Who's, who are all gonna be all in on this?Well, that's a great question. 6:02 I, I think if you look at the, all of the stakeholders in this, it's both the academic institutions and the, the governmental agencies, but also private industry plays a very critical role since if you look at all of the producers, that's, that's-- in private industry is where, uh, all of the production systems are. 6:23 So a lot of the knowledge base is in the academy. It's funded both in part by the government and, uh, private investors. 6:32 Probably for the last two months, I've been getting about one to two phone calls a week about this kind of technology and how producers of varying scale start putting this kind of technology to better manage their operation. 6:43 But ultimately, it'll be private industry that is the beneficiary of, of this type of technology and us as the, as the end consumer. So all of us are really all in on this food security problem. 6:57 So when we look at technology as a whole right now, it's very rapidly changing, and we've talked about whether it's AI, machine learning, AR, VR, robotics. 7:09 Is it going to be all of these type of positive disruptive precision livestock farming technology that'll all play a role in, in changing and evolving and, and contributing to what you're talking about here? I think yes. 7:27 I think, I think we're largely converging on all of the different technologies coming together to help us answer and solve these types of problems. 7:36 So, uh, what was traditionally, uh, you know, done with a, a shovel and a rake a-a, in a field is now being done in a computer. 7:46 So we talk about this as, uh, the next revolution in agriculture, which is digital agriculture. 7:53 And so what we're talking about here is really adding in an element, uh, to what's historically been looked at in the plant sciences. 8:00 Uh, we're adding in this digital livestock element to really complete the circle on the, the food supplies that we have here in the United States and throughout the world. 8:09 So are we talking about a new type of degree that students will need to get to be able to manage what we're talking about? 8:17 Because what you just described to me is a new level of education that an agronomist or what, what is the new degree gonna be to be able to do this? I guess I'm looking at what... I don't even know what you call them. 8:31 Are they engineers? Who are they now? Well, that's an interesting question. I'd say maybe it's a little bit, uh, it's a little bit of old and it's a little bit of new. 8:39 So I think that if we look at traditional majors, whether it be agronomy or plant, plant biologist or engineer, these, this digital agriculture and digital livestock is a new skill set in the same way that we gave-- wanted to give-- develop people with proficiency in, you know, microcomputer application and Excel and statistics back, you know, in the last couple of decades. 9:07 This no-- this new skill set is gonna help people in traditional fields do their jobs different and better. 9:14 But I think we're going to see the emergence of new digital agriculture-focused people who really kind of live at the intersection of a particular domain, whether it's animal science or plant science, engineering, coupled with data science, computation, artificial intelligence. 9:32 And so you're, you're gonna see a, really a win-win on, on traditional majors, but also the emergence of new, new majors as well. So are we looking right now to try to get companies to continue to fund startups? 9:46 Are we really trying to get a whole lot of people behind what you're doing? Are we trying to get, you know, big business to try to help fund what, at the academic level, at the private level? 9:58 Are we trying to get everybody involved and say, "Hey, we need to continue to invest to make this happen, to move forward right now"? 10:06 Well, I think what we're trying to do a-at the moment is really develop an infrastructure that a lot of people, uh, can get on to be able to develop. 10:14 So it's more of a development platform for all kinds of different stakeholders. And, and, and so you can, you can think about that in terms of, um, uh, let's say in civil engineering where we're interested in flooding. 10:27 Uh, the US Army Corps of Engineers developed the infra-- the modeling infrastructure to be able to do that. And as a result, we all were able to kind of speak a common language and get c-common results. 10:37 But companies were able to take a lot of that course technology that was open source and develop that for applications in their company and provide products and services that had, had added value that allowed the private sector to grow and us to be able to, to solve new and different engineering problems. 10:55 What I hope for this is that it does a very similar thing, but that you have new smart ag startup companies and even, uh, existing long-term companies that are, are able to add a new dimension 11:08 to what we're able to do for the management and decision-making in agricultural systems and food production. So this is, in people's visualization, it's the GitHub of precision livestock farming, but better. Exactly. 11:22 That's a very good way to describe it. So all right. Well, Josh, we are out of time, but where can our listeners go to jump on board and learn more about what you're doing? 11:33 So if you're interested in learning more about what we do here at the university, I would just direct people to our departmental webpage, abe.iastate.edu. 11:41 Or if you're more specifically interested in what I'm doing, I would direct people to my webpage, which is peschelgroup.org. 11:48 And if you're interested in telling us what was your favorite show that you've heard in six hundred episodes, you gotta put it online and tell us, 'cause that's what we wanna hear. 11:56 Hey, Josh, thanks for coming on and telling us all about the cool things you guys are up to, okay? Thank you so much. My pleasure. All right, listeners, that's all the time we have for this show today. 12:08 Remember, we broadcast live every Tuesday at twelve PM Central. Check us out at connectedworld.com or thepeggySmedleyShow.com. Tweet at us at ConnectedWMag. 12:18 This is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have an awesome week. Tweet at us. 12:29 [upbeat music] Everyone is constantly on the go, and relying on technology can help keep us in the know. Use your voice-activated service to connect to the most influential Internet of Things podcast. 12:46 It's as simple as, "Alexa, play The Peggy Smedley Show podcast." Listen to current and archived shows, or let Alexa assist you in subscribing. Never miss an episode. Alexa, play The Peggy Smedley Show podcast.
