AgGateway officials, representatives of member
companies and academics recently met to create a plan for finishing work on the
Commodity Automation for Rail and Truck (CART) initiative, which will establish
standards for grain-handling information management.
The
meeting, which took place in Shelbyville, Illinois, at the Software Solutions
Integrated corporate offices, was a key step in wrapping the
collaborative effort, which represents nearly two years of work.
Driven by growers’ needs, the initiative
aims to foster more effective exchanges of electronic data throughout the
transportation chain, allowing for improved interfaces between all steps of the process from harvesting vehicles to grain storage bins and everything in between. CART would implement AgXML standards for barge, rail and truck grain
transport, facilitating traceability and compliance with the Food Safety
Modernization Act.
“The grain industry has not been able to
efficiently track harvested grain—from harvester to grain cart, grain cart to
truck, truck to elevator and elevator to processor,” said AgGateway’s
Grain & Feed Council Chair Phil Kubesh, who is also the IT manager at Vita
Plus Corporation. “These new standards pave the way for growers to much more
efficiently transact and manage that valuable data.”
