In this November 2024 video, USDA Agricultural Research Service research ecologist Dr. Steven Mirsky talks about the need for advanced robotics, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence tools to ensure a growing U.S. agriculture. Mirsky notes that scientists are well positioned to lead the revolution in building robust, open-source image recognition pipelines that can train machines to identify and target individual plants or pests rapidly and enable site-specific solutions to agricultural problems. The vital need for these advanced tools grows as the agricultural workforce continues to shrink.

In a December 2025 Mississippi Soybean Promotion Board article, Dr. Larry G. Heatherly lauds the Southern Cover Crops Council for creating the Cover Crop Resource Guide. The guide provides information for 13 southern states on row crops, vegetables, and grazing and lists PSA’s Cover Crop Species Selector among valuable resources.

Author Andrew McGuire explains that most of the benefits of cover crops are related to their biomass production. “Biomass is the measure of additional energy that cover crops put into the biological field-soil system.” He calls out online resources, including PSA’s Cover Crop Species Selector in this March 2025 publication of Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. Image: University of Nebraska Extension.

Women have always been vital to the success of family farms and comprise nearly half the U.S. farmer population—but their work often goes unnoticed. Funded in part by Precision Sustainable Agriculture, researchers published a three-part series in August 2024 on women’s experiences in agriculture, on the American Farmland Trust website.

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.

In this 16-minute July 2024 episode of the AgTech360 podcast, Adrian Percy, executive director of the NC State Plant Sciences Initiative, interviews PSA Co-director Chris Reberg-Horton about his current research and the practical applications of robotics and sensor technology in agriculture.

The June 13, 2024, issue of the NC State Plant Sciences Initiative newsletter features an in-depth article on how PSA is using technology and AI to help farmers increase yield, reduce waste, and become more sustainable.

This ABC11 Raleigh-Durham news story from July 2024 describes how PSA’s BenchBot 3.0 is training AI to recognize plant species and phenotypes. It also explores how our camera technology, PlantMap3D, informs farm management decisions and how our open-source data and software serve the agriculture community.

In November 2022, the University of Vermont’s Food Systems Research Center (FSRC) announced the awardees of its Gene x Environment x Management (GEM) grants. PSA’s Heather Darby won for her research on corn varieties that are culturally significant to indigenous communities native to the Northeast.

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.

Advocates for “Resilient Agriculture” say the benefits of this practice are two-fold – it can increase agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers as it builds resilience to climate change…

University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Andrea Basche and Samuel Wortman weren’t sure their idea of a new agronomy cover crop course would come to fruition. Basche, an assistant professor in agronomy and horticulture, floated the idea of a cover crop course …

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.

Farmers have no shortage of tools to increase their crop output, but the Agriculture Department is taking the next step with industry to help establish the data-driven farms of the future. …

Farmers around the world are facing the urgent question of how to sustainably feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 — and the answer, in part, might be found …