OpenTEAM and Terran Collective Partner on Open Source Community Platform to Support Soil Health and Regenerative Agriculture

Freeport, MaineOpen Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management (OpenTEAM) is partnering with Terran Collective to create a free and open source digital community platform for farmers, ranchers, and the regenerative agriculture movement on Hylo. Together with the OpenTEAM community and input from Regen Foundation, Terran is designing new features to extend the social coordination platform to support people improving soil health and advancing agriculture’s ability to become a solution to climate change. 

The long-term goals of this partnership are to activate community among food producers and between producers and the public, to connect people to their bioregions, and to channel a greater flow of resources toward growers who want to engage in ecological regeneration–in order to build resilient local food systems and realize tangible benefits like improved soil health and carbon drawdown. 

“As a land steward, it is important to find others working on similar challenges, be inspired by those trying something different, and be able to communicate with purchasers and markets,” said Dr. Dorn Cox, Project Lead of OpenTEAM and Research Director at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment. “When developed and integrated into the OpenTEAM ecosystem, this platform will unlock a lot of opportunities to access new markets, knowledge, and technical support from our peers.”

The Terran team led OpenTEAM’s Community Platform Collabathon series this past autumn, where farmers, technologists, and advocates for equity and rights of nature collaborated to identify what community tools are needed most. The focus was to create ways for producers to easily connect with similar growing operations for mentorship, collaboration, and even market opportunities in the transition to regenerative practices, through the design of new features on Hylo. Participants include representatives from Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, Regen Foundation, Regen Network, Terra Ethics, Open Rivers, and the California Farm Demonstration Network.

“As a place-based organizing platform for networked groups, Hylo is uniquely positioned to facilitate the growth of relationships in the agriculture community,” shared Clare Politano, Hylo’s Product Lead. “We hope this platform will connect land stewards and the people who support them to the larger regenerative movement.” 

Designed for collaboration within and across organizations, Hylo helps groups break out of silos to coordinate as movements and meet the challenges of our time. The platform offers web and mobile apps with discussions, requests, offers, resources, projects, events, a geographic map, member directories, and direct messaging.

OpenTEAM is a farmer-driven collaborative community of food producers, scientists and researchers, technologists, farm service providers, and food companies that are co-creating an interoperable suite of tools that provide farmers around the world with the best possible knowledge to improve soil health. OpenTEAM offers field-level carbon measurement, digital management records, remote sensing, predictive analytics, and input and economic management decision support in a connected technology toolkit that reduces the need for farmer data entry. This tech ecosystem supports adaptive soil health management for farms of all scales, geographies and production systems.

Founded in 2019 by Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, Stonyfield, Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and USDA’s Land PKS, OpenTEAM has since grown to include 250 community members, 45 member organizations, and 15 Hub farms and ranches who are testing OpenTEAM’s suite of tools on the ground.

As OpenTEAM continues to build out its network, interested farmers, ranchers, scientists, technologists, organizations, and businesses are encouraged to connect with OpenTEAM via their monthly newsletter. You can learn more by exploring their website and finding them on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Interested in learning more and joining with other individuals and networks committed to regenerative agriculture? Get future updates on this Hylo-hosted OpenTEAM Community Platform.

###

About OpenTEAM:

Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management (OpenTEAM), is a farmer-driven, interoperable suite of tools that provide farmers around the world with the best possible knowledge to improve soil health. OpenTEAM offers field-level carbon measurement, digital management records, remote sensing, predictive analytics, and input and economic management decision support in a connected technology toolkit that reduces the need for farmer data entry. This tech ecosystem supports adaptive soil health management for farms of all scales, geographies and production systems. OpenTEAM was founded in 2019 by Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, Stonyfield, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and USDA’s Land PKS.

Press Contact:

Laura Demmel Gilmer
Head of Global Community & Operations at OpenTEAM
Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment
laura@openteam.community

About Terran Collective:

Terran Collective is a community of care and practice in the Bay Area bioregion, based in Ohlone territory in the area colonially known as Oakland, California. Their mission is to amplify cooperation among people regenerating our communities and our planet, by building systems and tools that foster trust and relationship. Terran supports their community by making connections, bioregional organizing, and experimenting with systems of solidarity. They build technology for thriving, so that their community and the movements they are a part of have the tools they need to create impactful action in the world. They are also land stewards and permaculture practitioners, personally committed to restoring and transitioning land to regenerative management.

Press Contact:

Clare Politano
Core Steward
Terran Collective
clare@terran.io

Hylo and Terran Collective Release Community Platform Collabathon Report

Terran Collective is working to create a free and open source community platform for farmers, ranchers, and the regenerative agriculture movement through the social coordination platform called Hylo. Together with the OpenTEAM community and input from Regen Foundation, Terran is designing new features to extend the social coordination platform to support people improving soil health and advancing agriculture’s ability to become a solution to climate change.

For eight weeks in August and September, Terran co-led OpenTEAM’s Collaborative Community Platform Collabathon. Farmers, technologists, and advocates for equity and rights of nature joined Terran, Regen Network, and OpenTEAM to identify needs for social coordination and how to best shape Hylo. Through this infrastructure we are building, we will: 

  • Nurture relationships of mutual support among farmers.
  • Develop community between farmers and the public.
  • Grow deeper connections between humans & landscape.
  • Enable a greater flow of resources towards regeneration.

Why Hylo?

Regeneration happens in place and it happens in community. Hylo is the only place-based platform that facilitates peer-to-peer collaboration across networked groups. As a result of what we co-create in this partnership, people engaged in regenerative agriculture will have access to coordination, collective governance, and finance tools calibrated to serve their needs.

The Collabathon

After establishing parameters for Hylo, OpenTEAM, and Regen Network participants to work together, Terran walked through the current profile & group functionality on Hylo to create a shared vision for future versions of profiles, like Farm Pages. They illustrated pathways for creating Farm Pages, including: how data is populated, maintained, and required API endpoints using the OpenTEAM ecosystem. APIs act as connectors between one technology and another, allowing them to “talk” to one another and exchange or transfer data. After creating these collaboratively, Terran held a Land Steward Engagement session to understand how Collabathon participants engage with land stewards, and gather the information necessary to develop a timeline and strategy for involving these land stewards in co-creating the community platform. Designs for Farm Pages were presented for feedback and collective visioning for how those designs should be adjusted. Terran also worked with Regen Foundation and how Hylo can support multi-stakeholder collaboration and allocation of funding. Lastly, Collabathon participants discussed how to incorporate community governance principles within Hylo.

Next Steps

Terran is taking what was learned in the Collabathon and implementing it in a set of features for Hylo that are currently in the development phase. This includes a set of interoperability with the OpenTEAM ecosystem, profile pages created specifically for farms, a way to represent land on Hylo, and implementation of collective governance principles.

Terran practices relationship-driven development to improve Hylo. This means they co-create with their stakeholders, and do their best to ensure that all relevant voices are included in our process. Through the Collabathon, Terran and Hylo learned that involving land stewards in these conversations is imperative. They learned that it is critical to go slow, build trust, and engage these folks in ways that are respectful of their time and energy. Using these principles, Hylo plans to test these new features with small groups of land stewards in a good and generative way over the course of 2022.

More about Terran Collective

Terran Collective is a community of care and practice in the Bay Area bioregion, based in Ohlone territory in the area colonially known as Oakland, California. Their mission is to amplify cooperation among people regenerating our communities and our planet, by building systems and tools that foster trust and relationship. Terran supports their community by making connections, bioregional organizing, and experimenting with systems of solidarity. They build technology for thriving, so that their community and the movements they are a part of have the tools they need to create impactful action in the world. They are also land stewards and permaculture practitioners, personally committed to restoring and transitioning land to regenerative management.

Interested in learning more about Hylo? Read the full report.

Special thanks to Clare Politano from Terran Collective for her support in creating this blog post and writing the full report.