AgCheck is a project that started from a meeting with environmental groups that were looking for ways to confirm that farms were using sustainable/regenerative practices.

I said, "Well if you are paying them for those practices, the farms would probably agree to allowing a drone to capture images of them using these methods."

After that, I connected with the Computer Science department at Oregon State University and the drone certification program at Lane Community College to work on this.

The result?

We built a tool that allows drones to take images of farms that are time and geo-stamped and then stored on blockchain - allowing viewers to know that the images have not been altered.

Cool article on the project here.

HempCheck was another project that began as a capstone project for computer science students at Oregon State University.

Hemp seeds are really expensive, and their genetics are incredibly important to growers - not only for the obvious quality of product, but also because if hemp goes above a 0.3% threshold of THC, the crop must be destroyed and there can be penalties for the grower.

Along with High Grade Hemp Seed we built a blockchain application that allows seed purchasers to have confidence that they were receiving the seeds that they were buying.

Run For Office is one of my favorite projects that I have worked on.

It's hard to know what you can run for (especially local offices) and how to get on the ballot.

To solve this, we built a tool that allows people to enter their address, see all of the positions they can run for, and what the process is for getting on the ballot.

This project started as a capstone project with Portland State University and later UC Berkeley, but ended up with the wonderful political software company NationBuilder.

I worked at NationBuilder for four years, and in that time we expanded the site to hold more than 150,000 public offices across the United States including all school board, county level, state legislature (House and Senate), statewide, and federally elected position in the country.

I still do some political data work, and I enjoy looking at where there are bottlenecks in representation for those that are underrepresented.

I have some fun projects that I'm working on right now. Mostly building prototypes and often working with engineering students that are completing yearlong capstone projects.

One is a blockchain application for wineries. It allows them to easily create a QR code so that wine information stored on blockchain can be quickly retrieved.

Another project I am working on is a monster political database that allows people to crowdsource information from all over the United States, and allows developers to download our data and political boundary maps.

And, I'm still working with drones/blockchain by working on a solution for the pending Remote ID requirements for drones by the FAA.

If there's one of my projects that resonates with you or you'd like to share your work, I'm all ears.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and/or send an email my way - jim@allthefarms.com