I really need to keep up on local farm news better because I was almost a month late in finding out about the IFarmer:Inventory app. Invented by Kiwi farmer Dan Smith, and advertised by Telecom, IFarmer is:

“The complete mobile inventory management solution for farmers and live stock agents. Real-time farm management, inventory control and reconciliation from the convenience of your mobile phone. Record and report on sales and purchases of stock, keep track of their locations, add notes, photos and other attachments. Export to desktop and farm accounting software.”

Most interesting for my research, Smith explains in the video above how the app can help farmers take care of the day-to-day requirements imposed by the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) programme and, in a further combination of technological determinism and everyday pragmatism, he explains that smartphones are “the way the world will be forced to go,” and “implore[s] people to jump on the bandwagon very quickly.”

A Dominion Post article also tells a good story about how such “grassroots” technologies come to life:

“Dan is a sheep, beef and cropping farmer and works seven different blocks within South Wairarapa and Carterton districts with mobs of stock scattered across the whole operation. He makes up to three or four transactions a day, which can be a bit of a nightmare, keeping track of all the details. It requires double and even triple entering figures into notebooks out in the field, which can be messy and inefficient.

He knew there must be a better way.

While Dan admits he is no computer guru, he has always been reasonably technologically savvy and he thought it must be possible to develop a phone application for farmers to keep track of inventory, animal health requirements and locations of mob groups, among other things. He started formulating the initial concepts on hard copy in August last year and, after much difficulty finding people with the right expertise, he employed software developers from a couple of New Zealand companies, PixelThis in Palmerston North and Simworks in Auckland, to construct the app to his specifications.”

Last month Canadian farming news site Alberta Farmer Express published an article on The Rise of the iFarmer, which focusses on smartphone apps that simply provide information on markets and weather. What seems to make the IFarmer app unique is the ability for farmers to easily input stock information and reconcile it instantly.

“Ifarmer is designed to be ancillary support to standard accounting software that most in the industry would have on their desktops already. For technology like this to be successful, it has to be straightforward to use. Dan has been conscious that farmers have to be able to get their heads around it without too much effort. Though the app he has designed has multiple features, its navigation is simple and remarkably easy to use. Dan demonstrated the input process on the farm and he even smeared his hand with dirt and water and showed that his iPhone had no problem interpreting his commands.”

Now, I wonder if it’s worth the $50 to see how IFarmer actually works, and how long it will be until similar apps appear?

NZ’s NAIT scheme has been in the news a lot more lately, and I just want to round up some of the stories for an article I’m working on.

Otago Daily Times: Opportunities for smart efficiency with tagging (Apr 11)
“By using available technology, farmers could work smarter and more efficiently to improve production.”

Wairarapa Times Age: Tags not just earmarked for cattle (Apr 13)
“Electronic ear tags for cattle are so useful, says one Wairarapa farmer, that he is using them for his sheep.”

Southland Times: Farmer warned to prepare for tagging (Apr 13)
“NAIT stakeholder engagement manager Dan Schofield urged farmers to check on their responsibilities.While the scheme would have a soft introduction with any breach of the rules leading to warnings, there would be significant penalties introduced.”

NZ Herald: Farmers fret over cost of new animal tags scheme (Apr 18)
“The Crown would provide, at most, $7 million to establish the scheme, plus 35 per cent of ongoing operating costs, with 65 per cent funded through levies. Ongoing operating expenditure would be about $6 million a year and NAIT was working through the levies.”

NZ Herald: Livestockers worry Big Brother is coming down to the farm (Apr 27)
“Federated Farmers’ major concerns about the proposed regime included its cost, its use of what was now regarded as obsolete technology, the powers the overseeing organisation would have to demand and even seize information, and the prospect the information gathered would be used to calculate charges for farm animals’ greenhouse gas emissions.”

Scoop: Biosecurity fundamental but NAIT questions remain (Apr 27)
“We need the biosecurity ambulance at the top of the cliff rather than relying on NAIT at the bottom, when really, it’s far too late.”

3News: Dairy companies call for electronic ID for sheep (Apr 27)
“The dairy industry and dairy farmers were making a significant investment in NAIT. Not having sheep will weaken their investment…A timeframe for inclusion of sheep and other at-risk species needs to be agreed before the initial go-live date of November this year.”

Ashburton Guardian: Ear tags to go digital (Apr 28)
“Although farmers realise NAIT is imminent, some see the technology as just another cost that offers little added benefits to traceability schemes which are already in place.”

Radio NZ: Fed Farmers fighting ID scheme to the last (Apr 28)
“Federated Farmers is making a last-ditch stand aimed at scuppering the much-debated national animal identification and tracing system, NAIT.”

Otago Daily Times: NAIT not a silver bullet, farmers say (May 2)
“While Federated Farmers fully backed biosecurity resources at the border “because biosecurity is the alpha and omega of not just farming, but the entire economy”, it remained of concern that the NAIT Bill was being treated as the only solution.”

Stuff.co.z: Farmers wary of tracing bill (May 2)
“Spokesman Lachlan McKenzie said the National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill gave NAIT officials excessive powers lifted from the controversial Search and Surveillance Bill to enforce compliance with the scheme.”

I’ve been looking at “farm to fork” food traceability in an attempt to articulate how “grower to garment” wool traceability is similar and/or different. (Don’t get me started on what either has in common with surveilling, er, tracing people…)

Here’s how IBM’s Smarter Food initiative frames the food problem and solution:

“Food is as fundamental as it gets. And our relationship with it has changed with every year. Just ten years ago, most consumers were focused on eating a diet low in fat. Biotechnology was extremely limited in its application and considered somewhat dangerous. And few people knew what organic meant or why it mattered. Today, the picture is one of heightened challenges. Food prices are soaring. Shortages have sparked unrest the world over. The threat of salmonella poisoning prompts the recall of millions of U.S. eggs. And every year, ten million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases. At the same time, consumers are hungrier than ever for information about their food. They are better informed about nutrition and more aware of the environmental and societal impacts of everything they buy … With innovative digital technology and powerful solutions, IBM is making sure food is traced properly as it passes though an increasingly complex global supply chain. IBM is also making that food heartier through biological research. The future of food starts today.

Pet food. Lettuce. Peanut butter. Baby food. Milk. These are just some of the high profile recalls we’ve seen in the last year. Consumers worldwide are worried—and rightly so. Is their food safe? And where did it come from? One solution is track and trace technology, including 2D and 3D barcode and radio frequency identification (RFID). This allows us to track food from “farm to fork.” And now government regulations and industry requirements for quality and traceability are driving food producers worldwide to provide more detail on products. With an increasingly global supply chain, that detail must be comprehensive and reliable. And with that detail, companies can realize added value as well, such as a streamlined distribution chain and lower spoilage rates. In fact, consumer product and retail industries lose about $40 billion annually, or 3.5% of their sales, due to supply chain inefficiencies.”

IBM: Setting the Table for a Smarter Planet (pdf)

And here’s a series of articles on traceability:

Ten examples of brands dishing up details on food origins
App for shoppers rates how brands address forced & child labour
Swedish dairy uses tracking numbers as a ‘still-made-here’ marketing tool
Supermarkets offer increased food traceability, for info and safety
Site alerts consumers to product recalls that affect them

Or how about a more DIY, hands-on approach?

C&T2011 Workshop > Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience

But the question remains: do people want or need the same information about products that they don’t eat, like clothing?

Tracing the history of what you buy
Zque: Ethical Wool
Icebreaker: Sustainability + Baacode
Patagonia: Footprint Chronicles
Rapanui Clothing: Traceability in Textiles
TEDxZurich: Robin Cornelius wants to make clothing traceable

And is there a difference between what we want to know and what we need to know?

Update: Siobhan O’Flynn extends this from “field to fork to feet,” or “bags at least”: You Gonna Eat That? And Wear It, Too?: A Restaurant in Brooklyn Sells Bags Made From the Hides of the Very Animals It Serves on Menu

Last night I went to the launch event for the Year of Chemistry, not least because it included a Merino Gold Fashion Show.

For the past five or so years, researchers from Victoria University’s School of Chemical and Physical Sciences and MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology have been researching gold and silver nanoparticles as colourants for high fashion textiles. Supervised by Prof. Jim Johnston, recent PhD graduates Fern Kelly and Kerstin Lucas [née Burridge] pioneered ways to embed nanoparticles of gold and silver in New Zealand merino wool.

“When the precious metals are reduced to the nanoscale (a nanoparticle is one billionth of a metre in diameter) they scatter light in different colours with silver appearing as yellow, peach, pink and purple and gold producing a range of brilliant hues. That means textiles in many colours can be created without using traditional—and mostly synthetic—dyes, adding to the sustainability of the innovation. Repeated testing by Drs Kelly and Lucas has shown that the gold and silver are bound to the wool with an ultra strong bond making the textiles totally colourfast and ensuring they do not fade in light or with repeated washing. In addition, the textile products incorporating silver nanoparticles have strong anti-microbial properties meaning they resist bacteria and pests, like moth larvae, that live in carpets. They also reduce the build-up of static electricity.”

Pretty exciting fibre science, to be sure. But I’m also completely fascinated by how it taps into broader cultural values. When NZ merino wool is already a high-prestige brand, the addition of precious metals only further stresses that quality. Drawing on the 100% Pure NZ brand, the fashions last night were introduced with terms like “pure merino,” “pure gold” and “pure luxury.” And sure enough:

“The initial target market for the golden wools is high end fashion accessories, fabrics and floor coverings. While it is around 100 times more expensive than wool coloured with organic dyes, there is interest for niche applications such as scarves, exclusive apparel and luxury carpet for residences, hotels or super yachts … ‘It’s had enormous market acceptance from the start. “Wow” is what people from across the wool industry say what they see what we are doing to add significant value to the New Zealand wool clip’.”

There’s a lot about the marketing strategy that deserves unpacking, and I think I’ll add a section to the paper I’m writing on NZ merino branding. In terms of sustainability, I understand that moving away from traditional (esp. synthetic) dyes is a big deal environmentally, but I don’t know enough about the process to know if the product isn’t automatically implicated in the environmental and health issues associated with gold mining. I mean, the gold has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? I’ll definitely have to follow up on that.

I’d also like to talk with them about working with designers, and how they understand the connections between science and creative practice. For the fashion show they worked with final year students from Massey University Fashion Design, and Greer Osborne won the fashion show competition with her “ready to wear look inspired by the New Zealand environment and in particular the merino wool product.” Dr Lucas was quoted as saying “It’s been fantastic getting creative minds on to exploring the possibilities,” but I’d be surprised if she thought that scientists weren’t also creative. I’ve always been fascinated when artists and designers say that scientists (or other academics) aren’t creative, as if creativity belongs to some professions (or people) and not others. I know plenty of scientists who object to that characterisation and, when the description is reversed, just as many creative practitioners who do not appreciate being told their work lacks intellectual or experimental merit. Surely the boundaries are much blurrier than all this suggests! For example, the MacDiarmid Institute asked researchers from around New Zealand to “enter the most interesting images from their work in a competition”–which effectively put creativity in the hands (or eyes) of scientists–and then the best images were put on display in The Art of Nanotech exhibition. Sure, “interesting” might not be the same as “beautiful,” but it is just as much a part of creativity or creative practice.

In any case, I’ve got loads more to think about now and I hope to arrange some time with the chemists before classes start up at the end of the month.

Further reading:
“Going for Gold, and Silver.” Twist, October 2008 (pdf)

I’ve been busy preparing my keynote presentation for Kiwicon, which basically means going through dozens of pages of notes I have on public discourses surrounding RFID and trying to wrangle them into a 30 minute talk. You’d think this would be relatively straight-forward but it’s a pretty complex issue approached by multiple publics in different ways. For this talk I’ll probably just focus on three inter-connected ways that RFID gets framed.

First, RFID is awesome because it’s convenient, efficient and secure:

Second, RFID is evil because it supports/normalises surveillance of activities and bodies:

Third, RFID is fun because it can be hacked or otherwise made to do interesting and/or playful things.

The first two should be recognisable from mass media accounts, and each could be sub-divided into multiple discourses that can be firmly oppositional, but are probably better understood as occupying various positions on a continuum between either extreme. I’ve chosen the third theme because I’m speaking at a hacker conference and because my own research focusses on how practitioners (geeks, artists, designers, activists, etc.) tend to imagine and engage with new technologies in ways that depend on the other two discursive positions, but often run parallel or perpendicular to them.

I’ll post my slides here after my talk, and in the meantime you can check out this video about a few clever pigs who use their fellow pigs’ discarded RFID collars to hack the feeding machines and get some extra chow:

The Running Hot! conference I attended earlier this month has posted videos of the two keynote addresses I found most interesting.

First, Nigel Thrift on Imagining Research Value:

Bryan Crump followed up with him on research in the NZ context, and Nigel suggested that the conference could be used as a model for others:

“Let early and mid-stage career researchers really take over an event but give them high level backing. That way lie new connections and the beginnings of real inter-disciplinary efforts…”

And second, Stuart Cunningham on Transforming Research Value:

Previously
Running Hot 2010: Enhancing Value
Running Hot 2010: Transforming Value
Running Hot 2010: Creating Value
Running Hot 2010: Imagining Value
Running Hot 2010: Early Career Researcher Symposium (Pt. 1)
Running Hot 2010: Early Career Researcher Symposium (Pt. 2)

[cc photo credit: Merino's Dream by Denisse Moreno]

Federated Farmer’s President Don Nicholson had some interesting things to say about the wool industry and research needs in his speech at the National Conference in June:

“MO2 is an example that conventional products can be taken in completely new directions. Look at Jeremy Moon of Icebreaker. A finalist for last year’s Federated Farmers‘ AgriBusiness Person of the Year. Jeremy has made merino wool sexy. Look at the development of gold kiwifruit cultivars and now in recent weeks, red. Yet some commentators seemed perplexed about the loss of the wool levy. One leading commentator went as far to describe it as ‘brainless’ and driven by ‘raw emotion’. Blaming hard pressed sheep farmers whose returns have imploded, is like blaming investors in a finance company, for the failure of a finance company. For wool to be on a par with the 1980s returns, it ought to be a $2.8 billion export but now it’s down to just under $500 million. As oil-based synthetics compete with wool, the demand drivers that have forced down price isn’t just a New Zealand problem, but a global one. It demands a global response. The Wool Council is part of the Prince of Wales’ wool project – designed to do just that. The Wool Council’s ‘wool hotel’ challenge is an incredibly exciting extension to switch global architects back to wool. It’s regulatory too – unbundling the road blocks erected by oil-based synthetics against complacent wool. In New Zealand, wool insulation should be everywhere but we’ve got glass and synthetic batts as standard. Wool offers immense potential, but that hinges on consumers to tune back into wool as an exciting, natural and renewable product. Yet the problem with wool is wool. Much of the thinking and research effort has put wool into two separate boxes – textiles and floor-coverings. What wool needs is research anarchy. A Richard Revell or a Roger Beattie to take wool and turn it on its head. What we need is a Wool-X prize to inspire innovators, entrepreneurs and inventors. A prize to take wool and manipulate it in completely new and novel ways. I’m not talking evolution but revolution. We’re not talking Keratec but mass market products. It’s time for business unusual because you cannot tell me that everything that can be done with wool, has been.” [emphasis mine]