David Bullock, professor of agricultural and consumer economics and principal investigator of the Data-Intensive Farm Management Project (DIFM) in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is part of a multi-institutional team that received a $646,000 grant from the USDA-NIFA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.
The U. of I. will collaborate with six community college agricultural technology programs to design and conduct a course and internship program teaching students to use DIFM’s cloud-based cyber-infrastructure to practice on-farm precision experimentation (OFPE).
“OFPEs are agronomic field trials that look at things like at fertilization rates or seed rates and how changes in those rates might affect yields. Many people are familiar with such trials conducted by university researchers on small plots of land. What OFPE does differently is that it uses precision agriculture technology and GPS to design and run very large plot trials on whole fields in many locations,” Bullock explained.
Source: illinois.edu
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Categories: Illinois, Education