Advancing AI in Agriculture through Large-Scale Collaborative Research

The grand challenge facing global agriculture today is the need to increase food production to feed a rapidly growing population, amid diminishing natural and human resources and climate pressures. With the global population expected to exceed 9.5 billion by 2050, and with several key resources being depleted (see sidebar), the agricultural community is turning to a digital revolution to secure the future of our food production. Touted Agriculture 4.0, this new movement is deploying digital technologies at scale, including field and aerial sensing, automation, and other smart devices to monitor and track resources and to improve operational efficiency. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are playing a central role in driving this revolution: enabling real-time decision support using spatiotemporal data collected on farms, augmenting human labor with automated decision making and robotics, estimating and forecasting risks due to extreme weather, and aiding in longer-term planning under climate-imposed uncertainties. To propel the development and deployment of AI tools and technologies for U.S. agriculture, since 2020 the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) has made a strategic investment in five AI institutes.