Landscape & Bollard Lighting

“Harvest Rest” | George Cole

One characteristic of the “customer experience” of school children, dormitory residents, patients in university-affiliated hospitals and attendees of large athletic events is the quality of food.  School districts and large research universities are responsible for hundreds of food service enterprises for communities that are sensitive to various points along the food supply chain.

The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) is one of the first names in standards setting for the technology and management of the major components of the global food supply chain.   It has organized its ANSI-accredited standards setting enterprise into about 200 technical committees developing 260-odd consensus documents*.   It throws off a fairly steady stream of public commenting opportunities; many of them relevant to agricultural equipment manufacturers (i.e, the Producer interest where the most money is) but enough of them relevant to consumers (i.e. the User interest where the least money is) and agricultural economics academic programs that we follow the growth of its best practice bibliography.

A few of the ASABE consensus documents that may be of interest to faculty and students in agricultural and environmental science studies are listed below:

• Safety for Farmstead Equipment
• Safety Color Code for Educational and Training Laboratories
• Recommended Methods for Measurement and Testing of LED Products for Plant Growth and Development
• Distributed Ledger Technology applications to the global food supply chain

The ASABE bibliography is dominated by product-related standards; a tendency we see in many business models of standards setting organizations because of the influence of global industrial conglomerates who can bury the cost of their participation into a sold product.  Our primary interest lies in the movement of interoperability standards — much more difficult — as discussed in our ABOUT.

The home page for the ASABEs standards setting enterprise is linked below:

ASABE Standards Development

As of this posting we find no live consultation notices for interoperability standards relevant to educational settlements.  Sometimes you can find them ‘more or less concurrently’ posted at the linked below:

ANSI Standards Action

We always encourage our colleagues to participate directly in the ASABE standards development process.  Students are especially welcomed into the ASABE Community.  Jean Walsh (walsh@asabe.org) and Scott Cederquist (cedarq@asabe.org) are listed as contacts.

You’ll rarely need a doctor, lawyer, or policeman

But every day, three times a day, you need a farmer pic.twitter.com/X4CTPe11eT

— Conor Lynch (@c_k_lynch) July 25, 2022

Category: Food

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jack Janveja, Richard Robben

Meet Raley Kirk from San Saba, TX. Raising hair sheep and Spanish goats in the Texas Hill Country, Raley is proud to play a part in providing the food and fiber our country depends on every day.

For her, National Ag Week is about highlighting that meaningful work and ensuring… pic.twitter.com/9KKC4pzRgC

— Dept. of Agriculture (@USDA) March 19, 2026

More

Why Industry Standards Matter https://t.co/Nn7CgfEdAV

— Scott Cedarquist (@CedarquistASABE) March 4, 2019

Lovely 1873 view of New York. Source: https://t.co/rixNirgB8S pic.twitter.com/tQz6SsXUv9

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) January 27, 2025