A major open-source image repository to be released nationwide this fall could be a significant step forward in helping unlock artificial intelligence’s potential for solving stubborn agricultural challenges.

Led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and NC State University, the Ag Image Repository, or AgIR, is a growing collection of 1.5 million high-quality photographs of plants and associated data collected at different stages of growth.

The collection will first be released on the high-performance computing cluster SCINet — a first step toward making the resource freely available worldwide to agricultural researchers in both public and private sectors.

Access to this data will be game-changing for plant intelligence technology around the world.

In July 2024, Tech Briefs magazine interviewed PSA Co-director Chris Reberg-Horton on why and how we’re building the Agricultural Image Repository, how a supercomputer is training AI to recognize plant species and phenotypes, the benefits to farmers of PSA’s low-cost technology, and more.

No-till farming, considered to be a more environmentally friendly farming practice that reduces soil disturbance when compared with conventional practices, appears to have an important benefit besides reducing soil erosion and nutrient runoff.

Congratulations to a collaborative PSA team which recently took 2nd place in the OpenCV competition! The team, from NCSU, Aarhus University, USDA ARS, and Texas A&M University, was lead by Paula Ramos Giraldo.