PEORIA, Ill. — The University of Illinois Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) is marking five years of providing innovative programs that give students exposure to up-and-coming ag technology and research, as well as career paths they may have not previously considered. During a recent AgTech Connect meeting in Peoria, CDA executive director Christina Tucker updated participants on the Center’s milestones and current projects.

In her opening remarks, Tucker defined the CDA as a collaboration between the U of I’s engineering and agriculture programs that was formed to help solve problems within production agriculture. “We need experts both within AI (artificial intelligence) and agriculture. We’re building teams that have experts on both sides of the spectrum,” she explained. 

“We’re also working towards technical innovation. We want to start facilitating movement of our research out of academia and into industry. We’re bringing in industry to collaborate on some of this research and these projects as well.”

Current “use-inspired” research projects underway at the U of I CDA include the involvement of over 30 faculty affiliates from sectors including computer science, electrical engineering, ag and biological engineering, crop sciences, animal sciences, natural resources and plant biology. Around $32 million in research funding has gone into programs and projects associated with the CDA, according to Tucker.     

“We are working on some connectivity issues for agriculture. When farmers don’t have access to the internet, it does them no good. We are looking at Star Link and citizen’s band radio service and other satellite and fiber networks to help bring them connectivity,” Tucker said. “We’re also working on things like Edge computing, to better handle data in the field and get (data) to the cloud, as well as visualization and data modeling to help bring that all together. We don’t want to keep having multiple systems and piling on the apps on farmers.”

Food supply and chain and logistics issues are also being addressed by the CDA, its executive director stated. 

“One of the projects about to go public is a statewide dataset of pig counting, tracking activities and behavior called Pig Life. We’re building a dataset where there are not a lot of datasets in the livestock space right now. This will be open to the public so others can start using the dataset for use outside the university,” said Tucker.

Soil health issues and sedimentation are also being addressed at the Center, with a tie-in to robotics in farming applications. Utilization of robotics in cover crop planting is a current topic of research, in partnership with ag tech startup EarthSense, which makes its home at the U of I Research Park. 

Tucker is proud that the U of I is home to the only United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded Farm of the Future, which she describes as a “test bed for new innovations in agriculture. We have 80 acres now but are expanding to 120, so we’ll have 40 acres that are planted with robots and (utilizing) technology. 20 acres will be planted conventionally and have cover crops planted on them after harvest. Ten acres will have no cover crops so we can do side by side comparisons and hypo-spectral imaging so we can build a dataset.”

Tucker lauded the U of I’s decision to offer online agriculture-related certificate programs. The first-of-its-kind program is meant to build on a traditional agricultural education by incorporating more training on new technologies being developed in agriculture. She said the CDA’s professional certificate program can help people get the skills they need to advance their career with as few as three classes.

“These classes are tailored towards a certain set of skills, (such as) applied statistics, automation and robotics, AI and machine learning, IOT (Internet of Things), data science and others, and are fully online,” Tucker said. 

Currently, Tucker and the staff at the CDA are working to increase the Center’s network of industry partners to help translate their research into real-world application. Start-ups and small companies will not be excluded from the industry partnership program by the CDA, Tucker said, while promising more details on the program by the end of 2023. 

For more information on the University of Illinois Center for Digital Agriculture, visit www.digitalag.illinois.edu.