AI Guided Advancements in Agriculture

Dr. David Mulla, Department of Soil, Water & Climate at the University of Minnesota

This talk will provide an overview of how AI is being used in agriculture, give some example success stories for AI applications in agriculture, and discuss future directions and challenges for accelerating the adoption of AI in agriculture. Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are rapidly emerging to assist producers improve productivity, efficiency of inputs and sustainability of agricultural practices such as tilling the soil, planting a crop, applying irrigation, fertilizer, manure or crop protection products, and harvesting.  AI is a powerful approach for assessing spatiotemporal patterns and uncertainty arising from variations in weather, soils, nutrient availability, insects, and disease that may affect productivity. AI guided tools are emerging to help producers with early detection and treatment of stresses from water, nutrients, pests and diseases.

Specific strengths of AI include computer perception and vision, classification, regression, clustering, and predictive analytics, multi-criteria, multi-objective decision-making, and natural language processing tools as exemplified by chatbots and virtual assistants. Advances in AI have fostered the widespread adoption of autosteer tractors in agriculture. Advances have also been significant in the areas of a) remote sensing for precision agriculture, b) detection of stress from weeds, insects, nitrogen or water, c) robotic navigation and manipulation, and d) crop phenology assessment.

Dr. Mulla is Professor and Larson Chair for Soil & Water Resources in the Dept. of Soil, Water, and Climate at the Univ. of Minnesota, and a member of the Executive Committee for the National AI-CLIMATE Institute.  From 2004 – 2024 he was Director of the Precision Agriculture Center at the Univ. of Minnesota. From 2007-2013 he was a consultant to the Millennium Challenge Corporation for a project to install erosion control practices and plant 8 million olive trees on 75,000 ha in Morocco.

Dr. Mulla and his coauthors (including 46 MS and PhD students) have produced over 230 publications, and have received funding of over $50 million.  Broadly speaking, Dr. Mulla’s pioneering research on precision agriculture contributed significantly to its adoption in the US and around the world, fostering business opportunities, job growth and greater economic and environmental efficiency in agriculture.

Dr. Mulla is an internationally recognized researcher and scholar.  His peers elected him as a Fellow in the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA), and as a Fellow in the Agronomy Society of America. In 2012 he received the Pierre C. Robert Precision Agriculture Research Award from the International Society for Precision Agriculture. In 2013 he received the SSSA Soil Science Applied Research Award.   He has served as Associate and Technical Editor for the Soil Science Society of America Journal, and as Associate Editor for the journal Precision Agriculture.