Today's farmer can choose from a wide range of precision farming tools, including machinery that makes targeted treatments of crops possible. Such specialized equipment fertilizes and controls pest problems only where needed and offers more than time and cost savings. Chemical runoff from farms is a major source of water pollution in agricultural areas, sometimes threatening water supplies, rivers, and lakes. Precision farming can reduce the use of these chemicals without threatening productivity.

However, a lack of high-quality data and the challenge of converting data into useful information have slowed adoption of new farming techniques. While some farmers have accumulated a lot of data about their fields over the years, collection methods and data quality vary. Farmers need more than mountains of data; they need useful information.

Lei Tian, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, aims to give farmers the data they need to bring agriculture into the Information Age. Tian and his research team at the U of I-based Illinois Laboratory for Agricultural Remote Sensing use global positioning systems (GPS) and remote sensing systems to collect high-quality data about crops, pests, and related issues. Working with researchers in NCSA's Automated Learning Group (ALG), Tian and his team pore through existing data to find meaning and relationships that can shed new light on problems in agriculture and promote new farming practices.

"In the normal field, only about 20 to 30 percent of the field has weed problems, which means you should only have to spray 20 to 30 percent," says Tian. "But in reality, we spray 100 percent. Farmers just don't have the information they need for precision farming."

Access Online | Posted 8-28-2001