Hi, I'm Nyle Taylor and I'm a fifth-generation shellfish farmer.
I'm Erin Ewald and I manage the sustainability certification and
environmental compliance at Taylor Shellfish. When I started at Taylor, we
were using hand-drawn maps and I knew there had to be a better way.
So Nyle and I are modernizing our company through GIS. In our oyster bars,
our customers are becoming interested in how and where their food is grown. Our
goal, is to educate them about our products and what makes them unique and
special. Using GIS and easy-to-use field apps, we're changing not only how we do
business, but how we tell our story. In fact, our oyster bar staff can use this
story map on an iPad to do just that. For over a hundred and twenty years, my
family has farmed shellfish in the Puget Sound. We have environmentalism in our roots.
Today, we're the only U.S company to
achieve the Aquaculture Stewardship Council or ASC certification, designating
our shellfish are farmed responsibly. Our farm managers, thank you.
Our farm managers and staff work day and night in all weather conditions to
bring the best product to our customers. It's important for us to thank them for
their hard work and dedication when telling this story. Each of our growing
regions and farming techniques creates a unique flavor profile. This encourages
both brand and geographic loyalty. In Samish Bay, the tide can recede over a
mile to expose large sandy tidal flats, rich with nutrients. We grow oysters,
clams and gooey duck here. The Pacific and Shikoku oysters are the same species
but the Shikoku are tied tumbled and truly are our premium oyster, and our Manila
clams from Samish are some of our largest, but now let's talk about the
fourth product. While all you geo geeks at this geo conference may have thought
this is a geoduck, it's pronounced gooey duck. We brought a live one with us, you
want to see it?
The gooey duck is a Pacific Northwest native and the world's largest burrowing
clam. In the wild they can live for more than a hundred years and weigh more than
12 pounds. This may be the only time a gooey duck is the co-presenter on the
user conference stage.
He's a little shy so we'll put him away for now. So how does GIS fit into our
tide to table mission? We've been using GIS at Taylor Shellfish for less than a
year, but we've taken advantage of ArcGIS online and the mobile field apps to
support the management of our products. Our company is growing in both size and
geographic reach and these mobile apps are leading the way in our digital
transformation. We have over 30 farms spread throughout the Pacific Northwest
with the highest concentration in the southern part of Puget Sound. Using
Explorer on our mobile devices, we're now able to take our real-time business,
operations and environmental data onto the farms with us. This ability to take a
wealth of GIS data into the field, like our farm shown in blue or priority
habitats and substrate types, helps us understand the environment we're working
in. As we combine this new understanding with generations of experience in a
suitability analysis, we use this data to identify optimal growing areas for a
different shellfish species. For example, we know that gooey duck grow best in
deep sand, usually located near feeder Bluffs shown in blue and purple. After
the analysis shown in green, we've confirmed that this gooey duck farm here
is well placed. Our farm manager can use Explorer to see areas that are
underutilized or maybe confirm that conditions have changed. He can mark up
the area using the new redlining function and make real-time suggestions
on where the farm can expand. With many of our farms in rural areas we lose cell
coverage, not just microphone coverage.
Explorer allows us the ability to go offline and still access our data and
attachments. When enforcement officers from Fish and Wildlife come by and ask
for our permit, we can provide the information no matter where we are.
Meeting multiple levels of regulation requires significant documentation. To
comply with permits and sustainable certifications, we collect information
about environmental conditions such as, the amount of shoreline debris we find
and remove from our beaches.
Using survey 1-2-3 on our phones allows
us to demonstrate this responsibility for our farm gear and our commitment to
environmental quality. We want to make field data collection a habit for our
staff and Survey 1-2-3 allows us to quickly configure and deploy tools for
the field. The first survey I created with the Herring Swan survey. Hearing our
critical food source for Washington State's endangered salmon, and we survey
the beach to ensure that our actions don't disturb their spawning sites. Crews
liked the survey because it was easy to use and short. We're proud of our ASC
certification. To achieve it we had to demonstrate that we met their rigorous
standards for both farms and processing. Survey 1-2-3 helped us collect this
information and put a process in place to maintain the certification. I modified
a Survey 1-2-3 restaurant sample, to reflect the ASC requirements and this
saved me hours of work. The Forage Fish Spawning Habitat survey is a community
sample published on ArcGIS online by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.
It contains the steps needed to collect
and share the required data with their biologists. We have a uniquely diverse
workforce many of whom are first and second generation Americans who have
been with the company for years. English is not the only language they speak, so
we created a multi-language survey, available in Spanish
and Khmer, the Cambodian language for our farm to be monitoring. This
encourages that habit to collect the information because it's accessible and
easy to use for everyone. From regulatory requirements to Thailand trash, we have
an app for that. By using and sharing these apps we encourage all of our
employees to contribute to sustainable aquaculture and a clean environment.
The Collector app is at the heart of our digital transformation. Our farmers
collect operational farm data to update their related tables of their farm beds.
We use the data they capture to evaluate the current status of our farms and as a
as a foundation for institutional knowledge. We're taking information that
was once only in our farmers heads and putting it into a shareable system.
In the early stages of our GIS implementation, Brian one of our farm
directors was in a serious car accident. When his external injuries healed and he
return to work, he became frustrated as he realized the accident had impacted
his ability to quickly recall the fine details of his farms. Recognizing his
struggle, we loaded up his information and asked him to test it for us.
Thanks to Collector, Brian is able to continue confidently in his role and is
now our strongest advocate for mobile apps.
Oakland Bay produces some of the world's best oysters and clams. While an
important growing area for us for nearly 50 years, the local Squaxin Tribe has
been harvesting shellfish there for centuries. When water quality began to
decline due to land-use problems, we started to work with our tribal
colleagues and put into place a coordinated effort to improve the health
of our watershed. We're starting to use Workforce to manage the water quality
sample assignments in Oakland Bay. We invited Erika, our colleague at the
Squaxin tribe to a Workforce project, to collaborate on these efforts. When we
have a one-inch rainfall event that triggers the sampling, I can go in and
select the sample points and create the assignment. If these were
fresh water samples, I'd assign them to Erika but since they're marine I'm going
to go ahead and assign them to Steve. Using this app we ensure that high
priority tasks are completed in a timely manner. On his phone, Steve sees the
assignments pop up. Since work force is integrated with collector he can log the
assignment and finish it. Our goal with Workforce is to coordinate with
additional tribes and health departments, to ensure that high priority areas
remain in production. Another task for streamlining is the mapping of our farm
beds. In the past, mapping our beds has been a time-consuming project. We wanted
to use imagery, but we have a special requirement for imagery because we want
to see what our farm looks like at low tide. Flying a drone and processing the
data with Drone to Map, finally lets us see our farm with useful imagery and
allows us to see the bigger picture. We can even see our farmers installing the
nursery tubes which will protect our gooey duck from predators while they're
young. When outlining bed layout prior to our use of Drone to Map, our farmers had
to estimate tidal elevation, but now we can use the elevation contour
lines created by Drone to Map. We now know that we can expand these beds along
this contour line and still be within the optimal range for farming gooey duck.
Laying out farm beds prior to our use of Drone to Map with a boots-on-the-ground
approach, where our farmers paste lines through the mud. Drone imagery
revolutionizes how we do it. Using a digital terrain model, it's easy to see
the natural drainages in the beach. We can build our beds around these to avoid
our seed from being washed away. Now that we've designed the beds in our
office, we can take the data into the field to make our bed layout faster and
more efficient. Many of our stakeholders don't have the opportunity to visit our
farms in person. Using 3D, we can take them on a virtual beach tour to help
them understand what it takes to go from tide to table. Taylor Shellfish is using
GIS to revolutionize our business for generations to come.
We're confident that we have the tools needed to adapt to challenges in our
dynamic environment. No matter what, or where we grow.
Thank you.