People, Planet, Profits & Projects

For our last post of 2021, I am going to leave your head spinning.  Almost literally.

It’s going to be short and sweet, but I am going to follow up with you in the clean new year.

What’s all this about spinning…and cleanliness?

I want to end 2021 by sending you to a podcast episode from Malcolm Gladwell.  He has an OUTSTANDING podcast series called Revisionist History.  I would say every episode is worth a listen.

In its own words, here’s what the podcast says about itself:

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every episode re-examines something from the past — an event, a person, an idea, even a song — and asks whether we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.

The particular episode to which I implore that you listen (and then come back early next year for a discussion) is called Laundry Done Right.  And yes.  It is about washing your clothes.  What the (insert bleep here) does this have to do with project management, you ask? 

Well, for the past 10 years or so, I have been giving talks about sustainability in project management in Italy, Costa Rica, South Africa, Canada, the USA, The Netherlands, Malaysia, and China.  And I have been using the analogy of a washing machine as a way to get project managers to – well – to become project leaders, to think about delivering value rather than just producing outputs or outcomes.  The analogy (not to give away the punch line) has to do with where the ecological value could come from in improving the whole process of washing your clothes.   It's about a cycle, all right - but not a wash cycle - or at least not only a wash cycle.  More next year - in other words, in a few days.

Gladwell nails it in this episode.  Give it a listen and I promise to connect this to sustainability thinking in project management (read that as project leadership) on the other side of 11:59:59PM, 31-December, 2021.

Hope you enjoy it.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!  May all of your projects be successful, and deliver ongoing value!

Cheers!

Rich Maltzman, PMP

Just finishing up on our “Smart Farming” series, which was inspired by this article in UMass Magazine, let’s talk about projects in the area of “agtech” – bringing technology – sophisticated technology – to farming.  In this case, we’ll talk about the blockchain of food.  To explain this, I found a very helpful podcast with a principal of ripe.io, which is mentioned in the UMass article, and the work of UMass graduate Hannah Leighton.

  Have a listen and come on back.

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/ripeio/2019/11/11/blockchain-of-food

Welcome back. Yes, it’s about blockchain, the same sort that powers cryptocurrency, but applied here to the shared “ledger” of food production and distribution.   From the article:

“Ripe.io extracts essential information to follow an item along the supply chain, and puts it all in one place—that’s the blockchain,” Leighton explains. “Where is the farm located, really? Is it women or minority owned? The blockchain identifies those key metrics,” she says. Blockchain can’t be altered, only added to, which is why it’s so secure. “Eventually, if you put enough false information on the blockchain, you’ll get caught,” says Leighton. “It weeds out bad actors.”

As we’ve done with the other posts in this series, we focus (as any good program or portfolio leader should) on the vision and mission of the organizations.  In this case, for ripe.io, it’s front and center on their web page:

Again, from the ripe.io website, this allows all of us – farmers, packagers, shippers, restaurants, consumers, to:

• INCREASE FOOD CONFIDENCE

by leveraging blockchain technology, ioT, AI and machine learning we aggregate real time data into one dashboard for predictive consumer analytics.

• BUILD BRAND INTEGRITY

our platform empowers our partners to provide their customers with food integrity data insights to ensure they are offering their customers the highest quality/sustainable food product possible.

• DIGITIZE FOOD BUSINESS MODELS

api interfacing allows our partners to capture robust data collections.

You can find a nice “pitch” from ripe.io that goes over their business model and you can imagine related, collaborative and competitive projects in this growing (pun intended) area.  Here's that pitch:

  In fact, after a bit more research, I found this summary of players in this area here:

https://builtin.com/blockchain/food-safety-supply-chain

To quote from the article and give a real example of how this is being used NOW:

“Retail giant Walmart recently employed blockchain to track and trace its lettuce supply chains and is being hailed as a next-generation solution in food safety. Walmart’s blockchain can trace food back to its grower in a mere 2.2 seconds.

As blockchain becomes increasingly prevalent in food safety (it also processes payments more quickly and distributes digital coupons for restaurants), we've rounded up five U.S. companies that are using the technology to change the way eat.”

It’s fascinating to me just how exciting a nominally boring topic, such as lettuce, when combined with innovative projects and initiatives like these provide that aforementioned advancement of Data to Information to Knowledge to Wisdom (DIKW) – see Part 2 of the series for more on that.

Although clearly, ripe.io and others are in the business of making money, they are also focused on the triple bottom line.  From an interview with their co-founder Phil Harris, the ecological and social aspects of their work are important as well:

Reducing food waste:

Annual food waste will reach 2.1 billion tons by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group’s 2018 report. By tracking and tracing food items in real time, supply chain participants are alerted of in-congruencies and can manage food safety, inventory and freshness to prevent food waste. ripe.io’s solution allows users to detect and communicate inefficiencies in fresh products and certify the information holds true on the blockchain system. 

Sustainability:

Customers want information beyond the physical food product. Visibility into organic certification, animal welfare practices, soil quality, etc. backed by a blockchain ledger help assure consumers the information provided holds true and aligns with sustainability values. It also holds the industry accountable for more ethical and sustainable practices that provide a better future for generations to come. 

Locality: 

Consumers want more validation on the origin of the food they’re consuming. Due to disconnected communication systems, food supply chain stakeholders have challenges providing this information. Through ripe.io’), consumers are able to track the granular details of the origin of their food products and better support local agriculture. This also helps mollify the rural-urban divide by generating rural economies and connecting our communities through food. 

I found this dive into smart farming fascinating, and I hope you did too.  It’s a bit ironic, because I also like comedy and recently, I ran into the comedy of Greg Warren, who has a whole album of (believe it or not) farm comedy.  I will close this series out on Smart Farming by (hopefully) providing you with a laugh or two, thanks to Greg’s ‘smart’ view of farming.

Image from https://www.successfuelformanagers.com/3-ways-develop-actionable-steps-project-planning/

Part 3 is the last (for now) in the series on Smart Farming - focusing on projects and programs in the area of growing and distributing foods.  As I wrote it, I realized that it had to be further decomposed into Parts 3a and Part 3B.  The decomposition theme continues here - in a WBS sort of way.  Read on, brave project leaders, read on.

In Part 1, I covered agrivoltaics - the practice of installing solar photovoltaic panels on farmland in a way that primary agricultural activities (such as animal grazing, insect resourcing (honey production) and crop/vegetable production) can continue.  In Part 2, we shift upwards - WAY upwards, to focus on satellite imagery and using data to discover and potentially repair problems with topsoil.

In Part 3, we bring our attention to the food that is grown on farms and projects surrounding its distribution.  Again from UMass Magazine, there is a piece about Farm to Institution New England, a network backbone that connects farms to institutions, such as universities and hospitals.  Their mission?

"Our mission is to mobilize the power of New England institutions to transform our food system."

A good mission statement deserves a vision that drives it.  We know this as project (and especially Program and Portfolio) leaders.

"By 2030, we envision New England institutions and the FINE network playing leadership roles in cultivating a region that is moving towards self-reliance. We envision an equitable and just food system that provides access to healthy and abundant food for all New Englanders, and is defined by sustainable and productive land and ocean ecosystems."

This is a project-oriented organization.  For a glimpse at some of their work, visit their projects page by clicking here.  I was fascinated by the  projects surrounding University dining.  As a long-ago graduate of UMass Amherst, I am of course proud of the UMass year-after-year number one ranking for campus food (very, very different from when I attended - can  you say "cube steak"?).  FINE has published (amongst many other items) this interesting report about the supply chain of food from local farms to university campuses, called Campus Dining 201 (click on the link or the image below for an immediate download).

In it, you will find a treasure trove of data (D) advanced into information (I) and knowledge (K), providing wisdom (W) (see the Part 2 post of this series to learn about the DIKW Pyramid).  Amongst the gems in this report, and of particular interest to project leaders, is the pie chart (see figure below) which talks about the definition of "local food".  We know that in a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), we need a WBS Dictionary to tell us what we mean when we say (for example) "Complete Electrical Wiring", and whether or not that includes installation of light fixtures.  It's similar to the idea of defining project success, so that we know when we're done - but on a work package level.

To even begin to understand the food supply chain and the element of 'local food', what do we mean by the term 'local food'?  The pie chart below tells us that we have some work to do in that area:

I was amazed by the fact that almost 3/4 of the schools don't define or know what is meant by local food.  So it seems some work is in order to provide the equivalent of a WBS Dictionary for terms such as this.  Otherwise we are in danger of compiling lots of data and creating lovely charts that are based on undefined or unknown inputs - a formula for disaster.  Work being done by groups such as FINE are helping us avert this disaster by providing some definition. 

Do your projects have concise and clear definition around the work to be done?  It's worth some background work on your part as a project leader.

In Part 3b, I'll close out this series with more about projects focused on the food supply chain and advancing data into information, knowledge, and wisdom in the area of just how that Christmas fruitcake from Auntie Catherine made it from ... wherever fruitcakes come from ... to your holiday table.

 Merry Christmas!

Cloud Ag visualization showing variable soil carbon levels across a single field. Image credit: Cloud AgCloud

This is the second in a series on Smart Farming; this one focusing on things way above the Earth and well, the earth of the Earth.  This is a post about how technology projects can be applied to increasingly important sustainability issues of all sorts, including, literally the soil under our feet.  It’s also a post about collaboration, combining different disciplines, and listening to stakeholders, all important principles of the 7^th Edition PMBOK® Guide.

  I open with a quote from the article from UMass Magazine.

A few years ago, (UMass) geosciences Assistant Professor Isaac Larsen was driving along in the Midwest, near where he grew up. “The hilltops in the landscape no longer had organic rich soil—just subsoil. I could tell by the color,” he recalls. A big driver of soil erosion and degradation is the plow. “Every time a plow goes across the landscape, it fluffs up the soil,” Larsen explains, "and the soil moves down the slope.” Over the course of a century and a half, that’s a lot of soil.

What to do? Supported by NASA, Larsen and his team are utilizing satellite imagery to analyze the problem. “We can relate soil color that we see in satellite imagery to the amount of carbon in the soil, and then relate that amount of carbon to a soil horizon,”—or soil layer—explains Evan Thaler, a doctoral student working with Larsen. The team has been able to show that around a third of all cultivated land in the United States has lost its rich topsoil. “The next step,” says Thaler, “is for policy makers to incorporate this information. If we can rebuild the carbon in the hilltops, we’re actually pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the soil, so it’s absolutely a climate change issue as well.” Larsen backs that up. “We have to mitigate the effect we’ve had,” he says. “Restoration of carbon to soils is one piece of the solution.”

So, this project was about applying satellite technology and business intelligence (BI) to collate and advance data into information, into knowledge, providing wisdom – a key theme for project managers.  If you are not familiar with the DIKW pyramid, today is the day you should investigate it.  You can start with this excellent article (Click here to read an outstanding article on the topic).

I found this theme reiterated in several diverse sources.  In this article from NPR, Evan Thaler is quoted again:

The soil that's darkest in color is widely known as topsoil. Soil scientists call this layer the "A-horizon." It's the "black, organic, rich soil that's really good for growing crops," says Evan Thaler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

It's full of living microorganisms and decaying plant roots, also called organic carbon. When settlers first arrived in the Midwest, it was everywhere, created from centuries of accumulated prairie grass. Plowing, though, released much of the trapped carbon, and topsoil was also lost to wind and water erosion. The soil that remains is often much lighter in color.

It's clear that this is important, but even more so when you note the connection to climate change, this gets even more interesting.  I found this article in a site dedicated to applying Artificial Intelligence to practical matters – in this case, soil carbon monitoring, the very topic of this Smart Farming post.

In short, it describes how soil systems (healthy ones, that is!) act as a carbon “sink” by sequestering atmospheric CO2, thus reducing greenhouse gas concentrations.  Healthy soil, says the article, is capable of storing twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and three times that in above-ground vegetation.  The article answers the question: “why initiate projects to carefully measure soil carbon?
 

Why should we monitor soil carbon:

• Improving Crop Performance: Building up healthy levels of soil organic matter can provide growers with higher yielding harvests showing greater resilience in changing climates (Paustian et al., 2019)
• Carbon Trading: With the proposed advent of an international carbon market and carbon trading, accurate monitoring of soil carbon will become increasingly important (Johns et al,. 2017).
• Mitigating Climate Change: Optimising natural carbon sequestration by improving soil conservation practices and restoring degraded soils can help to reduce concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As little as a 0.1% increase in organic matter can result in an additional 8.9 tonnes of CO2 sequestered per hectare annually by growers. 

Ironically, this post about the Earth’s soil provides some help for project managers who want to ‘build from the ground up’ in terms of advancing data into information, knowledge, and wisdom.

For more digging (pun intended):

“Soil organic carbon and carbon sequestration in Western Australia”

https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/climate-change/soil-organic-carbon-and-carbon-sequestration-western-australia

“Extent of Soil Loss Across the US Corn Belt”

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/8/e1922375118

“Quantifying carbon for agricultural soil management: from the current status toward a global soil information system”

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17583004.2019.1633231

Davis, et al , “Review of Soil Organic Carbon Measurement Protocols: A U.S. and Brazil Comparison and Recommendation”

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/1/53/pdf

OK folks, time to add a new word to your vocabulary:  Agrivoltaics. 

This refers to the practice of installing solar photovoltaic panels on farmland in a way that primary agricultural activities (such as animal grazing, insect resourcing (honey production) and crop/vegetable production) can continue.  It’s also called dual-use solar.

A recent article in UMass Magazine features several stories in one article; this post focuses on the first story, regarding (you guessed it) Agrivoltaics.  A portion of the article reads:

Dwayne Breger ’94PhD, director of the UMass Clean Energy Extension, says, “With dual-use solar, you do simultaneous solar collection and farming on the same land, together.” In theory, placing solar panels higher off the ground and spacing them farther apart allows the sun to hit both the panels and the plants sufficiently. In the mid-2000s, UMass installed one of the first dual-use arrays in an experimental farm in South Deerfield to test the theory.

Now, Breger’s team is working with three solar developers on eight different farms. “These site trials will greatly expand the data,” Breger says. “You’ll see active agriculture taking place under the array. It could be row crops or a field of hay or sheep grazing,” Breger says. “Raising the panels helps distribute the shading, and also allows farm machinery to get under and around them.” Fine-tuning dual-use farming can provide farmers with another revenue stream and more solar power for the rest of us. “We’re rooting for clean energy, and we’re rooting for farming and food.”

This short article inspired me to dig deeper and it led to a whole series of interesting findings.

An opportunity becomes a threat, becomes an opportunity again

One of the findings is related to project risk.  We all know that when we respond to a threat, there is a chance of secondary risk – that is, new threats (or perhaps even new opportunities) arising because of the threat response.  An example is an injury incurred from an air bag deployment.  The air bag is a threat response to injuries from impacts in auto accidents, and if the airbag itself causes injury – that’s a secondary threat.

In the case of solar farms, they are a response to the threat of climate change (and an opportunity to make money as a power-generation mechanism).  However, when they are installed, vast amounts of farmland could become unavailable – thus, a secondary risk of the solar farm deployment.

In fact, farm and ranch lands are often the ‘victim’ of urban and highly developed land use, some of which is solar farm use.  From the farmlandinfo website:

“between 2001 and 2016, 11 million acres of farmland and ranchland were converted to urban and highly developed land use (4.1 million acres) or low-density residential land use (nearly 7 million acres).”

The reports on the site also show how states have—or have not—responded to the threats of agricultural land conversion.

This is a good source of information on the topic if it has piqued your interest.  You can visit:

• State of the states:  Farming threatened by solar farm locations:

https://farmlandinfo.org/publications/farms-under-threat-the-state-of-the-states/

• Co-location of agriculture and solar:

https://farmlandinfo.org/media/co-location-of-agriculture-and-solar/

An example of the loss of agricultural land is shown below.  Interactive maps of every US state are available here.  This one is from northeastern Massachusetts. Red dots indicate loss of agricultural land

Continuing to dig into this after being inspired, I found a quite resource-rich US Department of Energy site covering (ironically) its aptly-named INSpire project.

New research demonstrates that states and regions can more than meet their ambitious solar energy goals on marginal and developed land without sacrificing its productive farmland and sensitive wildlife habitat.  Examples of interesting projects described in Inspire include:

• Solar-powered honey production (see photo below)
• Solar integrated grazing
• Floating solar on agricultural reservoirs
• Broad stakeholder impacts (sounds very 7^th Edition PMBOK® Guide flavored, right?)

I recommend visiting the US Department of Energy Inspire site: https://openei.org/wiki/InSPIRE/Project

You will find there:

• A Financial Calculator (to check project economic justification and rationale)
• A Data Portal
• A map of experimental sites

References

Overall (inspirational) source: https://www.umass.edu/magazine/fall-2021/smartfarm

Other references:

https://ag.umass.edu/clean-energy