“We have a critical need to increase food production worldwide,” said Adve. “We don’t have more land. We don’t have more people because labor in agriculture is reducing. We don’t have the luxury of environmental pollution. We have to be able to deal with significantly changing climate conditions and it’s really daunting.”
Testing the Future: I-Farm and Digital Agriculture
As agriculture modernizes, tools like AI, robots, sensors and plenty of data will help farmers do their work more efficiently, Adve said. Understanding this data and how to use it can increase the yield, health and resilience of crops.
For example, one area of research includes developing crops that require less nitrogen to grow, Adve said. This means they would require less fertilizer, lowering costs and labor for farmers while also minimizing fertilizer runoff—an environmentally harmful issue that degrades water quality.
“We are making farming decisions more easily, more effectively and also with more sophisticated techniques,” said Adve.
Illinois researchers including Adve are honing these technologies at an 80-acre testbed called the I-FARM, short for Illinois Farming and Regenerative Management. They’re applying digital farming methods such as AI and robotic labor to commodity crops, cover crops, and livestock using sustainable practices over a 3 year period.
Adve is also the director of AIFARMS, or Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability Institute. He said they are constantly working with and surveying farmers to understand their needs and concerns. While interested, he said many are concerned with cost, complexity and efficiency.
Jeff Kirwan is a corn and soybean farmer in New Windsor, Ill., and board director for the Illinois Farm Bureau. On his farm of over 4 thousand acres, he says he has always been a quick adopter of new technology.
Kirwan said nearly everything involves technology and data collection, and farming has very precise windows of opportunity. He said as farm sizes and demands grow, new technology is needed to cultivate more acres effectively. Technology like AI and autonomous robots would help optimize these small periods of productivity.
“Not only to help us be more efficient, but to also help us predict problems before they become problems, which is definitely a way for us to increase our profitability,” said Kirwan.
This is important to farmers battling ever-changing, hard-to-predict issues such as climate change. Kirwan said it is difficult when you do not know what to expect, but being aware and ready to adapt helps.
“It’s hard to factor it in, but we are cognizant of it,” Kirwan said. “It precipitates more, we have to get our operations done because our storm intensities tend to be higher now, with more frequency.”
Innovation meeting accessibility
Zeke Lundstrum was born onto a generational farm and is a graduate of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. While not a farmer himself, he was raised by and works with them as a hardware and embedded software engineer.
Lundstrum said accessibility is key to helping working-class farmers. For example, many farmers are already using computer vision technologies that use cameras and machine learning to help target weeds and use less herbicides.
“It is an excellent example of technology enabling the use of less chemicals for the same result,” said Lundstrum. “And that is like a real life application of computer vision.”
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