Sydney Uni harvests big data to boost crops

Embedding big data and machine learning into everyday farming could soon help Australia significantly boost its food production to meet growing demands without degrading soil and water quality or overusing fertilisers. That's the vision a University of Sydney research team, led by associate professor Thomas Bishop, will put to the test as they look for better ways to harvest information literally in the field by finding novel approaches to precision farming. The individual datapoints might be small, but the vision is large with agriculture taking up 56 percent of Australia's land surface and generating a wealth of data in the process - much of it currently unconnected. To get a much clearer picture of agricultural performance, researchers will investigate combining disparate data sets surrounding crop yield, weather, and management practices to better predict crop volumes and quality. This will guide researchers and the agricultural industry on how best to apply fertilisers to maximise grain output and quality, without increasing the amount of chemical runoff into waterways.