May 2022 | Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation

USDA NIFA Funds ‘Farm of the Future’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today that it is funding a new collaboration between two institutes and a research center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will create an integrated farm of the future in the U.S. Midwest.

Titled “I-FARM: Illinois Farming and Regenerative Management,” this $3.9 million, three-year project is funded through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The Illinois-led study will develop an 80-acre agricultural testbed, where commodity crops (corn and soybean) and livestock are farmed using synergistic and sustainable practices.

“We will accelerate creation, maturation, and adoption of new management technologies that are fundamentally more sustainable, profitable, affordable, and scale-neutral. The new practices will be enabled by maturing digital agriculture technologies developed in wide-ranging research efforts at the University of Illinois,” said Primary Investigator Girish Chowdhary, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering and Computer Science.

NIFA’s “Farm of the Future” proposal process was extremely competitive, and only one was awarded from across the nation, said Co-Investigator and Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) Co-Director Vikram Adve, the Donald B.Gillies Professor of Computer Science.

“This grant is a major endorsement of our growing strengths in digital ag,” Adve said.

The I-FARM is a unique partnership between CDA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at the U of I. Over three years, the I-FARM testbed will feature improved precision farming with remote sensing; new under-canopy autonomous robotic solutions for cover-crop planting, variable-rate input applications, and mechanical weeding; and artificial intelligence-enabled remote sensing for animal health prediction, nutrient quantification, and soil health.

“With the data gleaned from this project, the MyFarm app will provide farmers with an integrated dashboard that can be customized to the needs of their farm,” Chowdhary said. “Our focus on scale-neutral technologies can provide a solution to the worsening labor crisis for small farms and improve the sustainability of large and spatially heterogeneous farms.”

I-FARM technoeconomic simulations and farmer surveys will clarify barriers and incentives to adoption of sustainable technology to industry and farmers. Integrated extension activities will be conducted in a research space that is open to farmers, with demonstrations and training, easing the adoption of new technologies and opening new markets. The I-FARM team will also help the ag industry create new data-driven products and services for farmers, and an Industry Advisory Board and a Farmer Advisory Board will help the optimize impact on farming practices.

“Together, this integrated suite of solutions will lead to sustainable ways of meeting growing demand for agriculture in a changing climate,” said Co-PI and iSEE Interim Director Madhu Khanna, the ACES Distinguished Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics. “The CDA, iSEE, and NCSA built the strongest research proposal by reaching across disciplines and bringing together expertise from all over the University of Illinois — from computer science to economics to crop science and animal science, we are exploring as many aspects as possible as we seek to build a farm of the future.

“We look forward to a fruitful collaboration with this project — and similar multidisciplinary work in the future because it is the best way to solve most of the wicked problems this world will face.”

As the only “Farm of the Future” nationwide, “all eyes will be on this project as we lay the foundations for the future of agriculture,” Adve said. “We are excited to begin this venture and grateful for the support from across campus.”

Other U of I project members include Co-PI Kaiyu Guan, Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences and Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center; and Co-Investigators Isabella Condotta, Assistant Professor of Animal Sciences; Deepak Vasisht, Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Shadi Atallah, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics; Hamze Dokoohaki, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences; Salah Issa, Assistant Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering; Andrew Margenot, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences; DoKyoung Lee, Professor of Crop Sciences; and Bin Peng, Senior Research Scientist at iSEE and NCSA.

The Illinois team will partner with Olga Bolden-Tiller, Dean of the College of Agriculture, Environment and Nutrition Sciences and Professor of Animal Sciences, and Gregory Bernard, Assistant Professor of Plant and Soil Sciences, at Tuskegee University.

“This is an exciting time to embark on this project, and it is a credit to our team, their expertise, and the thriving research programs we can bring to bear,” said Chowdhary, who also holds affiliations with Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois. “I want to thank the institutes, CDA, our departments and colleges, and our Tuskegee partners for their help, the College of ACES for securing us the farm space, and especially those from the farming industry who graciously offered letters of support.”

Read the NIFA announcement >>>

— Article by Tony Mancuso, iSEE Communications and Public Affairs Director

Urbana-Champaign Campus Earns Its Fifth Consecutive STARS Gold Rating!

The recent addition of a second solar farm, this one 54 acres, boosted the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Gold certification in the STARS campus sustainability rating tool.

URBANA, Ill. — New solar and geothermal energy projects, a reduction in water use, and wide-ranging sustainability research helped the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign earn its fifth consecutive Gold certification in the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS).

STARS — the nation’s most comprehensive sustainability rating system — is a self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure sustainability, run by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Based on a detailed set of criteria in 18 categories encompassing environmental, social, and economic factors, schools earn points toward one of four ratings: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum.

Illinois has consistently achieved Gold certification since it began reporting data through STARS in 2013, and the 2022 score was one of its highest to date.

“We’re proud to be recognized among the world’s leaders in sustainability,” said Madhu Khanna, Interim Director of Illinois’ Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE). “Through the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP), we will continue to build on that legacy — and work toward STARS Platinum status — as we move closer to our goal of climate neutrality.

“Each time we submit STARS reports, the standards AASHE sets become higher. And we meet that challenge thanks to the intensified actions of our students, faculty, and staff — especially those at Facilities & Services (F&S). We are also grateful for support from our administration at the highest levels here on our campus.”

Illinois is one of 89 schools — and one of six Big Ten Conference institutions — to achieve up-to-date Gold certification in the latest 2.2 version of the STARS rating tool. More than 1,000 schools in 40 countries have participated in STARS, reporting achievements in academics, engagement, operations, planning and administration, and innovation and leadership. Illinois reported extensive data on water and energy use, transportation, waste handling operations, dining services, and more, coordinated by iSEE and F&S.

Among the “points of distinction” were the completion of the university’s 54-acre Solar Farm 2.0 along Curtis Road and First Street, generating 20,000 megawatt hours per year of photovoltaic electricity on campus; a geothermal energy system for the new Campus Instructional Facility, which will provide almost 65 percent of the building’s energy demand; and the NRES 285 “iCAP Student Ambassadors” course, taught by iSEE Sustainability Programs Manager Meredith Moore and Academic Instructor/Advisor Eric Green beginning in 2021. Students are trained in a bottom-up approach to campus sustainability implementation and learn about building-level iCAP goals. Solar Farm 2.0 and the iCAP Ambassadors course were nominated as finalists for AASHE’s 2021 Campus Sustainability Achievement Award, recognizing outstanding progress in higher education sustainability.

Other highlights from this year’s report include:

A significant reduction in water use through energy conservation efforts and installation of low-flow replacement faucets;
Public engagement, including a focus on community partnerships and continuing education opportunities;
Support for sustainable research opportunities and the number of participating researchers;
Sustainable dining options, such as vegan/vegetarian, and support for locally sourced procurement through the Sustainable Student Farm and on-campus farm stand; and
Campus diversity and affordability efforts through new policies and training, including support for underrepresented groups.

“STARS was developed by the campus sustainability community to provide high standards for recognizing campus sustainability efforts,” AASHE Executive Director Meghan Fay Zahniser said. “The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has demonstrated a substantial commitment to sustainability by achieving a STARS Gold Rating and is to be congratulated for their efforts.”

Explore the full STARS report >>>

— Article by Julie Wurth, iSEE Communications Specialist

U of I SMARTFARM Researchers Use Novel AI to Model GHG Emissions

Researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind knowledge-guided machine learning model for agroecosystems called KGML-ag, which includes less obvious variables such as soil water content, oxygen level, and soil nitrate content related to nitrous oxide production and emission. Credit: iStock

University of Illinois researchers were part of a multi-institutional team that has significantly improved the performance of numerical predictions for agricultural nitrous oxide emissions using novel modeling that combines artificial intelligence and process-based knowledge.

According to a release from the University of Minnesota — home of the corresponding author and Digital Agriculture Group lead Zhenong Jin — the team developed a first-of-its-kind knowledge-guided machine learning model for agroecosystem, called KGML-ag, which is 1,000 times faster than current solutions and also significantly improves the modeling accuracy of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

The research was recently published in Geoscientific Model Development. Researchers involved were from Minnesota, Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Pittsburgh. According to the Minnesota news release, KGML-ag was constructed by a special procedure that incorporates the knowledge learned from an advanced agroecosystem computational model, called ecosys, to design and train a machine learning model. In small, real-world observations, the KGML-ag turns out to be much more accurate than either ecosys or pure machine learning models.

“This is revolutionary work that brings together the best of observational data, process-based models, and machine learning by integrating them together,” said Kaiyu Guan, a coauthor of the study, Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and Blue Waters Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences (NRES) at Illinois. Guan is the Project Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Systems for Monitoring and Analytics for Renewable Transportation Fuels from Agricultural Resources and Management (SMARTFARM) project that funded the study.

“We are really excited to continue this collaboration with the University of Minnesota team led by Zhenong Jin to explore and realize the full potentials of KGML,” Guan said.

Jin, Assistant Professor of Agroecosystem Modeling at Minnesota, and Vipin Kumar, Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering at Minnesota, are co-authors who work on the SMARTFARM project led by Guan. ASC and SMARTFARM team member Bin Peng and ASC team member Wang Zhou, both from NRES at Illinois, also were among the article’s 16 authors. Guan and Peng are affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. ASC is a collaboration between the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation.

“There is a lot of excitement around the potential for agriculture to contribute to carbon drawdown, but unless we have accurate and cost-effective measurement tools to assess what is happening both above- and below-ground, we won’t see the market incentives we know are necessary to facilitate a transition to net-negative agriculture,” said David Babson, an ARPA-E Program Director. “I’m looking forward to the teams further expanding this research.”

Read the journal article in Geoscientific Model Development >>>