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Data Science Academy

Seed Grant Awardees Aim to Revolutionize Farming with Data Science

February 29, 2024

By Olivia Rojas, DSA Content Writer

In collaboration with the Office for Research Innovation, the DSA awards seed grants to help support interdisciplinary data science research efforts. To support on-farm profitability and enhance sustainability, research conducted by last year’s seed grant awardees is underway to equip farmers with cutting-edge data science tools.

The project, titled “Delivering On-Farm Recommendations through Interdisciplinary Data Science,” leverages cloud computing, analytics infrastructure, and data science expertise, and seeks to develop a farmer decision support tool via the SAS Viya platform — a full suite of cloud-based software that supports the entire analytics life cycle. The team has forged robust connections with SAS Institute as part of this project to ensure that the creation process for this tool within the SAS Viya platform is a success.

The tool, tailored for North Carolina’s agricultural landscape, aims to support over 5,000 farmers by integrating small-plot field data that dates back to 2019. A characteristic of many NC farms is that they are much smaller in acreage than you might find in the Midwest or other parts of the world. This small-plot field data encompasses roughly 50,000 data points that demonstrate the relationship of production practices with crop yield and quality across the state. By combining this comprehensive dataset with weather information, the tool will provide actionable insights to help farmers make data-driven decisions.

The anticipated outcome holds the potential to provide farmers with web-accessible models that will help produce data-driven solutions for soybean production practices, which will ultimately bolster the North Carolina agricultural economy.

In addition to the collaboration with SAS, this project is the first instance in which the NC State Soybean Extension Program has collaborated with the NC State College of Engineering to create a grower decision support tool.

The project team consists of principal investigators Dr. Rachel Vann from the College of Agriculture & Life Science and Dr. Cranos Williams from College of Engineering, graduate student Somshubhra Roy from the College of Engineering, project advisor and Wolfpack alumnus Dr. Katherine Stowe from the U.S. Soybean Research Collaborative and Spyros Mourtzinis, an agricultural statistician that works closely with the NC State
Soybean Extension Program.

After incorporating feedback from beta-testing and working closely with SAS on the public deployment, the intended release date for the tool is April 1, 2024. 

The seed grant program has been developed in collaboration with the Office of Research and Innovation (ORI). The goal of the DSA seed grant program is to increase interdisciplinary data science research at NC State. For more information, visit the DSA Seed Grants website.