WASHINGTON — If GPS-guided tractors led the previous revolution in agriculture, the next generation of farming is likely to be marked by unmanned drones with onboard sensors that can spot weeds and decide when and how much herbicide to spray to control their growth.
“We are thinking about technologies like drones, the integration of drones in a production facility that can spot out the weeds and where you specifically need to treat,” said Chavonda Jacobs-Young, the undersecretary for Research, Education, and Economics at the Agriculture Department.
Such technologies, collectively known as precision agriculture, would allow farmers “to reduce the amount of inputs, and it allows them to reduce the cost, and environmentally it allows us to minimize the amount of treatment that’s needed,” Jacobs-Young, who is also the department’s chief scientist, said in an interview.
The benefits of such technologies in combination with artificial intelligence-enabled tools, which combine vast quantities of sensor and satellite data on weather, water and soil conditions, can be presented on mobile phones and help small- and medium-sized farmers cut costs while boosting output, Jacobs-Young and other experts said.
Lawmakers spend so much time fretting over the risks technology poses in areas like data privacy, homeland security, children’s health and even entrepreneurship that it may obscure the reality in some parts of the economy, including agriculture, a sector where many people are still trying to catch up to what many urban Americans take for granted.
But as Congress takes up the quinquennial farm bill, lawmakers including Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill., and others have been pressing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Jacobs-Young and other officials on funding and progress on precision agriculture efforts.
The University of Nebraska, for example, is working on a project funded through a grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to develop an “intelligent and scalable unmanned aerial application solution for site-specific weed management.”
According to the university’s grant proposal, the goal is to develop a drone-based onboard sensing and decision-making system that generates a prescription map for herbicide application that can be further refined based on feedback from users.
Jacobs-Young said AI-based predictive tools using data from satellites also would help ranchers.
“Our goal is to be able to predict drought, to be able to predict how much water California, for example, is going to have based on the snow melt,” Jacobs-Young said. “And be able to predict how much grass a ranch is going to have for grazing and things that help producers be more economically viable.”
Precision agriculture also is being deployed in greenhouse settings to tailor plants to consumer tastes, said Saharah Moon Chapotin, executive director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a nonprofit that promotes public-private partnerships for research.
The organization receives funding through the farm bill with a requirement that such funds be matched through private partnerships.
A group called the Precision Indoor Plants Consortium is “attempting to give plants precisely what they need to grow in optimal settings for optimal efficiency, and to provide the optimal product that the consumer wants,” Chapotin said in an interview.
“You can think about micro-greens grown in a greenhouse and giving them just what they need in terms of inputs and also having the right genetics so that the bitterness is reduced.”
Reducing risk, cutting costs
