See how other groups use SurveyStack
Farm Networks

Regen Digital - Maximizing Data Utility for Australian Farmers
WHO THEY ARE -
Regen Digital is a platform designed to help farmers manage and derive value from their environmental assets. They are run by Regen Farmers Mutual, a farmer-owned data cooperative based in Australia, and are working to provide farmers with a “digital twin” that allows for environmental assessment and modeling–with the ultimate goal of capturing and understanding the entire environmental value of their land.
HOW IT WORKS -
Regen Digital is using SurveyStack to collect the necessary data from farmers to create the “digital twin”, a digitized farm record stored in FarmOS. This allows farmers to store data in a way that can be accessed and shared with service providers while still maintaining control over their information. The data collection process is fairly straightforward, it doesn’t require producers to learn a new software, and it allows data to be collected once and pushed to multiple platforms. Regen Digital is using this feature to push the data to the digital twin in FarmOS and then to Farmlab, a service that helps identify field boundaries and provides stratification services, and to LOOC-C, a tool for valuation of environmental assets developed by the commonwealth government.
Regen Digital employs the following SurveyStack features:
- Calls for survey submissions quickly and easily using magic links
- Subgroups for project management
- Question Set Library for Common Onboarding
- Integration with FarmOS to create the farm’s digital twin
- Using API compose to push data to Farmlab and LOOC-C
- Populating data for the Farmer’s Digital CoffeeShop, a visual benchmarking tool designed to allow farmers to make informed management decisions
Crucially, Regen Digital needed a tool that was capable of meeting their current needs while also ensuring the ability to scale and adapt for future projects. Their upcoming plans for SurveyStack include connecting producers to environmental markets, certifications, and property markets–all from a single entry point. A producer would select the providers they are interested in and then fill out relevant questions, and their answers could be pushed to each individual service without re-entry. As Rohan Clarke, director of Regen Farmers Mutual puts it, “We needed a way to collect data from our farmers that was flexible and easy-to-use, yet understood agriculture. SurveyStack is that tool.”
CREATING TOGETHER -
Regen Digital worked with the OpenTEAM network to create and design the Common Onboarding Question Set, available for use in SurveyStack. They are using these questions to onboard their farmers and begin collecting the data needed to understand their carbon opportunity and connect the farmers with resources.
By working together, Regen Digital and Our Sci were able to co-create the specialized software toolchain over the course of the project. The RD team identified the importance of branding the farmer’s experience, improved the Common Profile questions used by other groups, and shared their experiences in onboarding broadly. Our-Sci also brought their years of experience enrolling farms through projects like the BFA, helping Regen Digital avoid costly early lessons. These developments are now part of the updated Common Profile, available to all users as part of the Question Set Library.
If you’d like to learn more about the work that Regen Farmers Mutual and Regen Digital are doing, you can get involved here.

Collaborative Research Groups

The Bionutrient Food Association - Open-Source Research for Nutrition Transparency
WHO THEY ARE -
The Bionutrient Food Association (BFA) is a nonprofit dedicated to increasing quality in the food supply by connecting plant, soil, and human health. They work with growers across the U.S. to document the connections between management practices, environmental conditions, soil health metrics, and crop nutrient levels– and they needed transparent tools for collecting, tracking and reporting this data. On partnering with Our-Sci, founder Dan Kittredge reports:
“We needed a structure to be able to connect the data between the agricultural management practices and the soil metrics and the food nutrients. SurveyStack has now become this amazing, deeply thought open-source framework for interoperable data.”
HOW IT WORKS -
The BFA has been a key partner in developing many of Our-Sci’s tools, including the handheld reflectometer and interoperable survey questions. To tackle the sort of complex, interrelated data sets foundational to questions of nutrient density, they needed a full-stack solution. Here’s the path their information takes:
- Collected in the field or lab & compiled using SurveyStack
- Pushed from SurveyStack to FarmOS through API compose
- Assembled into a database that pulls from more than 20 different surveys
- Accessed through an automated query generator
- Shared via custom dashboards
- Deployed as prediction models with tools like the Bionutrient Meter
In practice, the process looks like this: a Bionutrient Institute partner fills out an informational survey in SurveyStack, then makes a sampling plan for their season. They submit surveys with planting and crop management information throughout the season, and another survey guides them through the process of packing, recording, and shipping crop and soil samples. When their samples arrive at the lab, all that information is ready and waiting in their SurveyStack account, linked by sample number. Lab scientists use SurveyStack to input test results, and users receive back not only their own results, but contextualized information about their crops and soil with the BI’s whole data set– the largest library of soil and crop nutrition information available today.
CREATING TOGETHER
SurveyStack provides a clear, traceable pathway to guide data from the farmer, through analysis, back to the farmer and beyond. Users are able to view their own data in innovative ways, as well as contribute to the overall mission of the BFA: to define nutrient density in crops based on management practices, environmental conditions, soil health metrics, and crop nutrient levels. By focusing on the key components of flexibility, accessibility, and replicability, this community has made incredible strides toward unraveling the complexities of nutrient density. As Kittredge put it at a 2021 talk called Defining Quality,
“We’ve got variations defined in nutrient levels on twenty-one different crops, we’ve got a framework for looking at soil management practices and environmental conditions, fertility programs, genetic variation, overlaid on soil carbon and biological activity and soil minerals, overlaid on nutrient variation– so we’ve built this framework out to be able to answer these deeper questions, and now we’ve begun to receive the resources necessary to take it to the next level.”
If you’d like to learn more about the Bionutrient Food Association or the Bionutrient Institute, you can get involved here.

Communities

OpenTEAM - Smart, Collaborative Tools to Improve Decision-Making
WHO THEY ARE -
OpenTEAM (the Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management) is a diverse, farmer-driven community created with the purpose of building and sharing tech tools to fight climate change. Their organizing principles focus on making agricultural knowledge accessible to all land stewards, regardless of scale, in order to put the best available solutions into practice.
OpenTEAM has grown to more than forty-five organizations– representing public and private entities, food companies and agri-ecosystem markets, research universities, and farmer and rancher networks– that comprise a robust ecosystem. By bringing together professionals that otherwise would not connect, they promote collaborative solutions that would otherwise be impossible–but collaboration at this scale requires building trust with collaborators and technologies, improving interoperability among systems, and adapting tools and soil health practices locally. Our-Sci worked in conjunction with OpenTEAM to build SurveyStack to address these information and collaboration pathway limitations.
HOW IT WORKS -
Before SurveyStack, OpenTEAM used spreadsheets and Google forms. They entered data manually into farmOS or other farm management tools, but the need for collaborative question sharing was clear.
“The great potential with SurveyStack is really to allow for the aggregation of data without commodification. We can aggregate without losing resolution, sovereignty and control over data. We can aggregate without losing attribution and that is a really powerful pathway, because of what it allows us to do. One of the core orientations that OpenTEAM has taken – that I think is really important to large-scale collaboration – is focusing on the way in which we ask questions – the way we ask questions together,” says Dr. Dorn Cox, project lead and founder of OpenTEAM.
OpenTEAM uses SurveyStack to build surveys, such as requests for feedback from community members; onboarding or adding hubs and farms to their network; and methodology or sampling protocols for use in the field. SurveyStack standardizes the way data gets sorted and allows for the use of API compose to push the data to external software. This allows their hub and farm members to only have to submit data to SurveyStack once in order to access it across multiple platforms.
OpenTEAM is actively working on a Common Onboarding Form, set to be released in 2022, that will further allow for data comparability and standardization. This form, built as a SurveyStack question set, will provide consistency across numerous tools in the ecosystem, including Hylo, Cool Farm Tool, and the Farmer’s CoffeeShop– changing the way farmers operate and expanding their access to opportunity.
CREATING TOGETHER
Shaylan Kolodney from Caney Fork Farm is a part of the OpenTEAM hub network. She said the following at the OpenTEAM Continual Improvement & Measurement in Soil Health webinar:
“I just wanted to point out how awesome the suite of technology that OpenTEAM is creating is, and how useful it is in the community…everything that everyone here is collaborating on is presenting itself in areas where I wasn’t even expecting.
Then it made our collaboration with the Bionutrient Institute super seamless, because the information that we were putting into our SurveyStack uploaded to our FarmOS account that we already had. Just knowing that on the back end, all of the people and the technology and the people creating the protocols are working together, it really helps us on the ground, helping to collect our data and using it in a practical way.”
If you’d like to find out more about OpenTEAM, you can get involved here.
