FarmVibes FarmBeats - image of farm with AI data overlay
Research for Industry

Project FarmVibes

Democratizing digital tools for sustainable agriculture

Why focus on sustainable agriculture?

FarmVibes - man walking through a wheat field towards a distant  arn

As one of the biggest contributors to climate change, agriculture, along with land use degradation and deforestation, account for about a quarter of the global GHG emissions and consumes about 70% of the world’s freshwater resources.

Agriculture is also amongst the most impacted by climate change. Farmers depend on predictable weather for their farm management practices, and unexpected weather events, e.g., high heat, floods, etc. leaves them unprepared to handle impacts by climate change.  

By adopting sustainable agricultural practices, including those that can help remove additional carbon from the atmosphere, farmers can also help drive progress to address climate change.

However, making progress on any of the above challenges is difficult due to the lack of data from the farms. Existing approaches for estimating emissions or sequestered carbon are very expensive.

Through this project, our goal is to enable researchers, practitioners, and data scientists to build affordable digital technologies to help farmers (1) estimate the emissions in their farm, (2) with climate adaptation by predicting weather variations, and (3) determine the right management practices that can be profitable and help improve soil health.

We are building on top of our previous research on FarmBeats, to create tools that can help drive adoption of sustainable practices for agriculture. Some of the key technologies include:

Key technologies

FarmVibes - photo of silos and an antenna against a sunset sky

FarmVibes.Connect

Capturing farm data from sensors, drones, and farm equipment

Andrew Nelson launches a drone from the back of a pickup truck

FarmVibes.Edge

Processing farm data captured by drones or other farm sources

Andrew Nelson studies a FarmVibes.AI image on a tablet

FarmVibes.AI

Extracting intelligence from farm data and remote sensing sources

FarmVibes - graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message

FarmVibes.Bot

Using chat bots to connect with the farmer, either to query data or relay insights

close up of corn stalks, farming, food

Outreach and partnerships

Our team collaborates with a number of academic and scientific institutions and serve on various advisory boards.

Advisory boards

Teaching partnerships