Precision Agriculture
By 2050, it is estimated that there will be nine billion people on Earth. New technologies will be needed to feed the world’s population, and to grow food in outer space. Climate change adds to the pressure of food scarcity. Precision Agriculture provides both traditional field growers, as well as growers in a controlled environments, with the tools to more effectively and efficiently grow and monitor their crops. Collecting various types of data from the plants using drones and various sensors are examples of precision agriculture. The Biosystems Engineering Department has faculty working in Precision Agriculture on main campus in the Vegetation Index & Phenology Lab (VIP), at the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC), the Maricopa Agricultural Center (MAC), and the Yuma Agricultural Center (YAC).
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Faculty with Precision Agriculture Research Components:
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| Dr. Pedro Andrade Sanchez | Dr. Kamel Didan | Dr. Mark Siemens |
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Using drones equipped with sensors and other imaging technologies, BE is collaborating with scientists at Yuma and Maricopa Ag Centers to develop simple and near-real time tools to assist farmers control and manage field crops. Integrating cameras and sensors into drones, we capture spectrums of light invisible to the naked eye and measure crop development with higher precision and sub-millimeter resolution.
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The world's largest robotic field scanner is at the University of Arizona's Maricopa Agricultural Center. Mounted on a 30-ton steel gantry and moving along 200-meter steel rails over 1.5 acres of energy sorghum, the high-throughput phenotyping robot senses and continuously images the growth and development of the crop, generating an extremely high-resolution, enormous data stream — about 5 terabytes per day! (Past Project)
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