Ag Tech Investments News

Expanding on Cornell’s digital agriculture initiative, a slate of six projects totaling more than $1 million will generate innovative research in the intersecting fields of agriculture, computation and engineering.

Research investment from the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station (CUAES) will fund six proposals over three years focused on developing computational and informational technologies to create more profitable, efficient and sustainable agricultural practices.

The projects – featuring collaborative expertise from researchers across Cornell – will tackle issues and emerging technology critical to modern agriculture: robotics, weather forecasting, big data, privacy concerns, animal health and natural resources management.

CUAES director and professor of entomology,Jan Nyrop said, “At Cornell, we are uniquely positioned to address technology challenges faced by growers as they adopt powerful big data systems into their operations.”

To connect agricultural researchers with Cornell experts in engineering and information science, a series of winter meetings launched by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) aimed to spur conversation with researchers from CALS, the College of Engineering (CoE) and Computing and Information Science (CIS).

Nyrop said the grant funding process aimed to capitalize on the interdisciplinary capacity of the university, with the goal to invest in promising research with the potential for the greatest impact to growers as data, automation and analytics are becoming essential parts of agricultural operations.

Source: http://news.cornell.edu/