About Us
Precision Sustainable Agriculture integrates sustainable agriculture and precision to maximize farm productivity, profitability, and sustainability. Our transdisciplinary team consists of universities, government agencies, private businesses, and farmers. We connect farmers with site-specific knowledge through technology and people to enable science-based, real-time decision making and long-term planning.
-
Precision Sustainable Agriculture aims to develop nation-wide tools and information to support farmers, regardless of where they live. Our network includes 25 states, over 120 research sites on working farms, Canada, and Denmark.
-
Transdisciplinary research is the collaboration of researchers from different disciplines and stakeholders to address a common societal problem. At PSA, our teams consist of biological scientists, social scientists, educators, extension agents, government agents, farmers, and other agricultural professionals.
-
Technology is constantly being created. However, there is a disconnect in the innovation phase and the adoption; huge costs and risk-adverse companies prohibit farmers from adopting new technologies. PSA accelerates adoption by building affordable prototypes that focus on affordability and ease of use.
The Problem
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 will require transformative changes to our food production systems. Water scarcity, herbicide-resistant weeds, climate change, and declining soil and water quality are increasing crop production risks, lowering yields, and negatively impacting the environment. Increased use of sustainable agricultural practices, such as reduced-tillage, diversified crop rotations and integrated weed management in tandem with cover crops is necessary to achieve this goal. However, farmers repeatedly cite management complexity and a need for site- and system-specific information to aid in our transition to sustainable agriculture.
Our Response
At Precision Sustainable Agriculture (PSA), we have built a thriving, trans-disciplinary community consisting of agricultural experts, engineers and data scientists, social scientists, commodity boards, NGOs, agribusiness, and technology companies. Using real-time communication and coordination, PSA builds pathways from scientific discovery to the development of useable and useful, web-based decision support tools (DSTs). DSTs inform farmer management decisions about cash and cover crops, and help farmers to allocate resources and labor and increase efficiency while improving their farms and environment.
Continued Solutions
As farmers utilize the DSTs and provide feedback, PSA works to improve the precision of our recommendations, creating a continuous positive feedback loop for increasing the precision and sustainability of our food systems.