$162K USDA grant doubles AI-powered agricultural research conducted by New College of Florida students

Florida college using AI to protect crops

A big grant from USDA is giving more resources to the New College of Florida and its AI-powered agricultural research. FOX 13's Kimberly Kuizon reports.

SARASOTA, Fla. - Students at New College in Sarasota are using artificial intelligence to help farmers grow and protect their crops.

They're working with the USDA to create AI models that will help get more of what they grow into the market.

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Big picture view:

The work Elif Yildirim has produced could one day be used to help pistachio farmers in California.

"They grow on such a large scale, so little losses add up very quickly and they have a lot of things to keep track of during the season," Elif explained.

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Farmers experience loss of pistachios from drought and also the navel orangeworm.

"Their focus is reducing crop loss after harvest," Elif shared.

Dig deeper:

Elif, a second-year grad student at New College of Florida in Sarasota, worked with researchers from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service to apply AI while building a computer vision model to distinguish eggs from larvae on stick trap liners placed in the crop.

"If growers are able to track the development of the bugs in the orchards that given season and kind of narrow down when they think that the pests will hatch, then they can spray pesticides far less just around that window instead of spraying all season long and protect the yields of the crop," she said.

She also worked to turn crop loss records into a full data set to produce a damage prediction model.

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"A lot of them are researchers and entomologists. They don’t necessarily have a data science or AI background," Elif explained. "They might know a lot of statistical modeling and those methods, but with how new AI is they want to take advantage of what’s come out in the coming years."

Another student built an interactive dashboard to show pest inception records from agricultural imports at U.S. Ports of Entry.

The work that is being done could one day play an active role in protecting our agriculture.

"Going out and talking to the real scientists who work on those topics every day is such a challenge, but it’s a good challenge to have. It’s an exciting challenge to have," said Dr. Klingenberg.

What's next:

A $162,000 grant from the USDA to New College of Florida will allow for up to eight students in the spring and summer semester to intern with the USDA while building these projects.

"It's great to see the innovation that is going on at the USDA, too. We had a project that looked into how to milk cows and how to optimize that. We had a project that analyzed bee audio data to predict foraging bouts of bees," said Dr. Bernhard Klingenberg, a professor of statistics and the director of applied data science of New College of Florida.