SBIR Phase II: Advanced Bioeconomic Forecasting Enabled by Next-Generation Crop Monitoring

这一小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二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，而农业本身对于创造经济活力的农村地区至关重要。当涉及到从他们的作物中获得好的价格时，农民往往处于劣势，因为营销供应链中存在严重的信息不对称。我们开发了硬件和分析的组合，以更容易获得的价格极大地改善了作物预测，使农民和他们信任的买家能够做出更明智的营销决策。改进的农艺可以提高产量5-10%，而改进的营销可以增加25%的收入，特别是对高价值的作物。除了用于预测的传感硬件和分析的狭隘应用之外，我们的平台收集的数据还可以被种植者用来做出决策，以改善复杂农业综合企业的运营业绩，并改善农场的农艺。这些工具可以更容易地比较作物的表现，以提高产量和降低资源成本。这项技术将继续提高农民的生产率和盈利能力。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目将一个全新的工厂和天气传感平台与分析相结合，将数据合成为能够推动农业综合企业决策的可行形式。我们将一整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，提高了农业数据收集的简单性。这些数据是专门为监测作物表现及其对天气和管理的敏感性而设计的。数据合成是将原始数据转化为种植者可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，这些数据将提供有用的建议，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。我们在这里的研究目标是生成概率预测，使用来自我们硬件的独特数据来估计关键的作物生长参数，并为可操作的产量预测进行预测。这种信息量大的现场数据与复杂的参数估计和预测技术之间的结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 II 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. We have developed 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. Whereas improved agronomy could raise yields by 5-10%, improved marketing could raise revenue 25%, especially for high value crops. In addition to the narrow application of sensing hardware and analytics for forecasting, the data collected by our 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 II project integrates a completely novel plant and weather sensing platform with analytics that synthesizes data into actionable forms that can drive agribusiness decisions. We have bundled 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. Our research objective here 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 parameter estimation and forecast techniques could dramatically improve marketing decisions and help farmers capture better prices for their products.