By Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D. and Tiffany Heng-Moss, Ph.D.
Experts from around the world recently gathered for the World Food Prize’s annual Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue to explore modern agriculture's most pressing challenges. After that gathering, it is especially timely to examine rapidly emerging precision and digital technologies — such as sensors, drones, robotics, data analytics and artificial intelligence — that are transforming food production. These tools provide farmers and ranchers with new opportunities as well as new complications to be solved.
Our nation’s land-grant universities play a vital role in advancing precision and digital tools. At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, our approach provides a template built on innovation, collaboration and collaboration with producers to develop and implement practical, science-based solutions. Several landmark achievements on the ag tech and digital and precision ag front illustrate how this vision drives success and impact.
Our NFarms digital and precision ag initiative, for example, demonstrates key attributes for success in research and commercialization: commercial-scale testing grounds, innovative ag technology and software development, high-level data management, partnerships with producers and companies, robust research transfer to practical products and services, and opportunities for graduate and undergraduate research and hands-on learning.
NFarms is part of UNL’s Eastern Nebraska Research, Extension and Education Center (ENREEC) — a 10,000-acre living laboratory that is part of a network of research sites across the state. This massive research site provides a test bed for the university and private industry to develop new technologies and platforms to help producers better harness data for improved field management. The platform incorporates robotics, sensors and drones, along with advanced data management for field studies on some 3,000 production acres — a research size rare in university circles that enables us to operate on a real-world, commercial scale.
Research commercialization is a key follow-up, and a standout example of such entrepreneurial success is Sentinel Fertigation, founded by CEO Jackson Stansell when he was a UNL graduate student. While at ENREEC, Stansell developed a groundbreaking framework and software that optimizes fertigation applications by using satellite imagery of the crop canopy. The result: Sentinel Fertigation leads the way in refining nitrogen management. Thanks to startup support from The Combine — an agriculture technology incubator at our university’s Nebraska Innovation Campus — the company now operates in 14 states.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with NFarms at ENREEC is our Klosterman Feedlot Innovation Center, one of the largest research feedlots in the world, enabling producers and industry partners to test emerging technologies in a commercial-scale feedlot.
The facility’s open-air and covered pens enable researchers to improve the performance and environmental impact of cattle in varied settings. Precision techniques at the center’s 240-head feeding facility help researchers evaluate the outcomes of various feeding protocols and study precision feeding technology.
Elsewhere across the university, researchers are harnessing artificial intelligence to advance precision agriculture through fully autonomous farm robotics and AI-driven weed management systems that can distinguish crops from weeds for highly targeted control.
Our university’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources participates in the DAWN project, a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture-supported collaboration among leading experts, agricultural stakeholders and institutions. Our Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute and the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture provide scientific leadership to help Corn Belt farmers adopt advanced technologies for more efficient, sustainable production. Through DAWN, irrigation management uses satellite, drone and aircraft imagery to provide farmers and water managers reliable, data-driven insights for decision-making.
To connect producers with our research results, Nebraska Extension educators serve all 93 counties across the state. Through on-farm research and the Testing Ag Performance Solutions program, producers collaborate with university researchers and Extension specialists and educators to test technologies and management strategies under real-world conditions, ensuring research outcomes that are practical, relevant and immediately applicable.
Tom Eickhoff, a leader at Bayer Crop Science, offers this observation: “With its real-world, farm-scale research capabilities and expertise in precision-ag and agricultural software, UNL is uniquely positioned for ground-breaking research and application of cutting-edge technologies.”
At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, we aim to be relentlessly relevant, moving ag tech and precision and digital ag forward each day. As we and other land-grant institutions continue to advance these tools, the opportunities for producers and the broader agricultural industry will only continue to grow.