Using Big Data to Produce Bigger Return for Growers, Less Environmental Impact

Aug 01, 2024

By Dave Graves

Two South Dakota State University researchers are partnering with 20 eastern South Dakota farming operations and GEVO to pursue practices that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase farm profitability.

“Increasing the Adoption and Generation of Climate-Smart Practices to Produce Low Carbon-Intensity and Net Zero Sustainable Products” is designed to quantify the carbon intensity score for jet fuel produced from corn in South Dakota.

Hossein Moradi, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, is co-PI with David Clay, the principal investigator. Clay, a distinguished professor and South Dakota Corn Endowed Chair in Precision Agriculture, has been conducting agricultural research for 30 years.

Moradi was new to agricultural statistic work when he arrived at SDSU in August 2018. However, the director of SDSU's Statistical Consulting Center has been working with Clay for several years.

In these projects, Moradi is using statistical models and machine learning/artificial intellence techniques to convert information from satellites and drones, combines, soil test results, weather reports, soil surveys and farmer practices into recommendations that will reduce costs and improve profitability.

Moradi boils it down: “Are there farming practices that improves soil health while minimizing the impact of agriculture on the soil, water and air?

“We’re also tracking climate data, such as mean, minimum and maximum temperature and moisture, to produce a model that will be useful to South Dakota farmers.”

Project runs through December 2027

The project started in January and finishes up in December 2027, so this is the first growing season to accumulate a full data set. However, the researchers do have onsite climate data for the past two years as well as satellite imagery, which, through the federal government’s Landsat satellite, passes over the sites every 16 days, Moradi said.

He said he is developing statistical models that include farming practices, seed types, and fertilizer data in addition to climate and satellite data.

Moradi said, “We need a better machine learning model to assess the data. I’ve had lots of back-and-forth conversations (with David Clay): ‘Maybe add this or that type of data. Is this variable useful in the model?’ As a statistician, I don’t know enough about agriculture to know what variables should be included in the model, but I do know how to develop models that are useful to answer scientic questions.”

Iowa State, Colorado State partner with SDSU

SDSU has two other academic partners in what overall is a $30-million project financed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program. Iowa State and Colorado State have similar projects underway. SDSU’s share of the budget is $1.8 million.

Moradi said his challenge as a statistician is, “Data comes in lots of shapes and forms. I have to make sure all the data is at the same level. For example, Landsat data is based on 30-meter pixels. (Farm) combine data comes in 10x10 pixels. I have to develop an appropriate data integration model. My job is to find out what state-of-the-art model is the best to analyze the data or develop my own models to get the job done.”

Naturally, most of the data collecting is done during the growing season with modeling occurring during the off-season.

By the end of the project, Moradi and Clay hope to be able to submit their findings to multiple research publications. The researchers also are working with Gevo, an Englewood, Colorado-based firm with plans to develop sustainable transportation fuels. In early 2021, Gevo bought 240 acres near Lake Preston to develop sustainable aviation fuel using corn.

‘The data always has a story’

Moradi said, “Gevo has a lot of farms in its network, and w e hope to help create a structure and roadmap leading farmers to improved soil health.”

Clay said the farming partners are all corn and soybean operations that are reducing their tillage intensity, planting cover crops, using improved nitrogen management techniques and applying biological products that are designed to improve soil health.

Moradi said, “Farmers are doing most of the work and we are working hard to insure that they will receive most of the project benefits.

“As a statistician, I believe that data always has a story and I have to find the best way to tell that story.”

Source : sdstate.edu

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”