The researchers call their effort COALESCE – COntext Aware LEarning for Sustainable CybEr-agricultural systems. They have just won a five-year, $7 million Cyber-Physical Systems Frontier award jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Introducing the latest cyber capabilities in sensing, modeling and reasoning to the real world of plants and soil, the researchers wrote in a project summary, will “enable farmers to respond to crop stressors with lower cost, greater agility, and significantly lower environmental impact than current practices.” The lead principal investigator for the project is Soumik Sarkar, the Walter W. Wilson Faculty Fellow in Engineering and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State University.

“You hear about precision agriculture all the time,” Sarkar said, referring to the practice of monitoring crops and soils to make sure they get exactly what they need for optimal production, while also reducing the need for fertilizers, pesticides and other expensive and potentially polluting inputs. “Now, we’re trying to move another notch above that.” Call that “ultra-precision agriculture, which is scale agnostic,” said co-PI Asheesh (Danny) Singh, a professor of agronomy and the Bayer Chair in Soybean Breeding at Iowa State.

More information are provided in ISU news.