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

这项小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将是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，农业本身对于创造经济活跃的农村地区至关重要。由于营销供应链中存在严重的信息不对称，农民在从作物中获得好价格时往往处于不利地位。该项目将硬件和分析相结合，以更容易获得的价格大大改善作物预测，使农民和他们信任的买家能够做出更明智的营销决策。除了传感硬件和分析预测的狭窄应用之外，该平台收集的数据还可以被种植者用来做出决策，从而改善复杂农业企业的运营绩效，并改善农场的农艺。这些工具可以更容易地比较作物的性能，从而提高产量并降低资源成本。这些技术共同提高了每个农民的生产力和盈利能力。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目将一个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。该项目将一系列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，增加了收集农业数据的简便性。这些数据专门用于监测作物性能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可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，使农民能够针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。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，并为操作产量预测进行预测。高信息量的定量田间数据与复杂的基于集合的参数估计和预测技术之间的这种耦合可以极大地改善营销决策，并帮助农民为他们的产品获得更好的价格。

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.