14TSB_ATC_IR_Optimising Big Data to Drive Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

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This project will address key agronomic/soil related challenges currently impeding sustainable intensification (SI). Current levels of wastage and field losses across the UK horticultural sector are not sustainable and are largely attributed to soil degradation-related constraints and inappropriate crop management approaches. This project will focus on minimising wastage and field losses as underpinned by sustainable soil management. Soils are the foundation of food production as they support crop production, and for growers, soil is their primary business asset.We will drive SI in horticultural and arable production systems by creating a coherent agri-informatics data set covering a comprehensive range of rotations derived from potato, cereals, oil seeds, sugarbeet, alliums, roots and brassica's of unprecedented resolution and scale (5-10 years' worth of data covering >20,000 ha). We will use methods particular to agri-informatics, which consist of data-mining and computational techniques that identify and describe the environmental and agronomic drivers of crop production and crop utilization such as Bayesian belief networks, neural networks, and random forests to determine how the history and prevailing context of a field influences its current state, performance and potential for future utility (SI), and elucidate how metrics of soil health can be used for system monitoring, management and improvement. The data framework to realise this project is already established via the 'Soil-for-Life' (SfL) system an existing company scale Soil Information Management System underpinned by the aforementioned 'agri-informatics' approaches. The SfL system permits the collation of soil physico-chemical and biological parameters, specific indicators of 'soil health', crop, varietal, agronomic, meteorological, water and economic data, all deployed to support the suite of related analytical and data mining tools. This project will develop mobile applications and related web data services which will be deployed to provide growers in the field with synchronous, geo-referenced access to the SfL databank. Growers will be able to consult the harmonised data holdings on a parcel basis, field by field, both for historical and contemporary operations. Summary results from the agri-informatics analytical tools will also be provided. Thus outcomes from geographic locations judged to be similar environmentally will be made accessible, highlighting actions taken and outcomes - allowing for knowledge transfer between growers. This project will allow an in-depth analysis and exploration of this 'big data', providing robust scientific evidence to support SI and to maintain soil health at a field, farm and enterprise scale. This project will act as a catalyst for a step-change in the way that 'big data' currently generated and stored locally by UK Agri-businesses is combined and critically, fully utilised.