SBIR Phase I: Advanced bioeconomic forecasting enabled by next-generation crop monitoring

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将使农民能够从其作物的营销中获得更大份额的收入。 农业是美国经济的重要引擎，农业本身对创造经济活力的农村地区至关重要。 农民在获取作物的好价格方面往往处于不利地位，因为在销售供应链中存在严重的信息不对称。 该项目开发了硬件和分析的组合，大大提高了作物预测，价格更容易获得，使农民和他们信任的买家能够做出更明智的营销决策。 除了传感硬件和预测分析的狭窄应用外，该平台收集的数据还可用于种植者做出决策，以提高复杂农业综合企业的运营绩效并改善农场的农艺学。这些工具使比较作物的表现以提高产量和降低资源成本变得更加容易。 这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目将一种新型的植物和天气传感平台与分析相结合，将数据综合成可操作的形式，从而推动农业综合企业的决策。 该项目将一套功能捆绑到一个硬件单元中，包括传感、通信、GPS、安装和太阳能，这大大降低了成本，提高了收集农业数据的简单性。 这些数据是专门设计来监测作物表现及其对天气和管理的敏感性。 数据合成是将原始数据转化为供种植者采取行动的见解的关键痛点。通过创建一个集成的硬件平台，这些数据可以提供有用的建议，使农民能够对新出现的情况采取行动，预测即将发生的事件，甚至预测未来。 一个研究目标将是生成概率预测，使用我们硬件的独特数据来估计关键作物生长参数，并预测未来的业务产量预测。 这种信息量大的实地定量数据与复杂的基于整体的参数估计和预测技术之间的结合，可以大大改善营销决策，帮助农民为其产品争取更好的价格。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to empower farmers to capture a greater share of revenue from the marketing of their crops. Agriculture is a significant engine to the U.S. economy, and farming itself is vital to creating economically vibrant rural areas. Farmers are often at a disadvantage when it comes to capturing good prices from their crops because there are significant information asymmetries in the marketing supply chain. This project develops a combination of hardware and analytics that greatly improves crop forecasts at dramatically more accessible prices, which allows farmers and their trusted buyers to make more informed marketing decisions. An addition to the narrow application of sensing hardware and analytics for forecasting, the data collected by the platform can also be used by growers to make decisions that improve operational performance of complex agribusinesses and improve the agronomy of the farm. These tools make it easier to compare performance of crops to improve yields and reduce resource costs. Together this technology continues to raise productivity and profitability per farmer.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project integrates a novel plant and weather sensing platform with analytics that synthesizes data into actionable forms that can drive agribusiness decisions. The project bundles a suite of capabilities into a single hardware unit that includes sensing, communications, GPS, mounting, and solar power, which dramatically reduces the cost and increases the simplicity of collecting agricultural data. These data are uniquely designed to monitor crop performance and its sensitivity to weather and management. Data synthesis is a critical pain point in transforming raw numbers into insights for growers to act upon. By creating an integrated hardware platform, the data is poised to provide useful advice that allow a farmer to act on emerging situations, anticipate upcoming events, and even predict the future. A research objective will be to generate probabilistic forecasts that use the unique data from our hardware to estimate key crop growth parameters and project forward for an operational yield forecast. This coupling between highly informative quantitative in-field data and sophisticated ensemble-based parameter estimation and forecast techniques could dramatically improve marketing decisions and help farmers capture better prices for their products.