USDA pilots data-driven smart farms powered by Internet of Things

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USDA pilots data-driven smart farms powered by Internet of Things

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USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, together with corporate partners like Microsoft and Esri, have launched what they call the Data Innovations project, aimed at using the Internet of Things and other technologies to give farmers and researchers near-real-time data on farm conditions.
From a data collection standpoint, the pilot could be a game-changer for USDA researchers, who until now have jotted down data points in field books called “green books,” before entering them into a central database.

At a 7,000-acre farm at its Beltsville Area Research Center, USDA has deployed sensors, drones and IoT-enabled farm equipment for a public-private pilot program called Farmbeats. The data then gets beamed up to the cloud, where an AI algorithm provides data visualization to farmers and researchers

Following a demonstration of the Data Innovations pilot programs last week, Michael Buser, USDA ARS National Program Leader for Engineering, said these smart sensors would help more than 2,000 Data Innovations ARS scientists collect data more quickly and accurately.
“We’re collecting a lot of data very manually and that’s killing how much research we can actually get done,” Buser said in an interview.
Dan Roberts, the research leader of the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Systems Lab, said the project serves as a central repository for information, and helps ensure all the research data winds up where it’s supposed to.
“When we worked with these green books in the past, when a scientist would retire [and] go to another job, a lot of times that data was lost from a lot of very, very expensive experiments,” Roberts said.
Steven Mirsky, a research scientist with the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory, said that data will allow his team to help make farms around the country more efficient.
“If the farm is a Lego … across the U.S. and around the globe, we’re literally taking these Lego blocks and building them together to build this system of record for agriculture, which we can then look at managing the data, doing analysis real-time at scale,” said Jeff Peters, Esri’s director of global business development.
The goal of what we’re trying to do, as part of this partnership, is build that kind of a system for data collection across all farmland,” Chandra said

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