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 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.