Amount Requested: $250,000
The requested funds would support the Computational Agriculture Initiative, which is a program that enables farmers to use high performance computational tools to make sound crop management decisions.  The goal of the Computational Agriculture Initiative is to enable farmers to make sound decisions about crop management for both economic and environmental purposes. The main focus of the Initiative is on the use of high-resolution climate data and dynamic simulation models for nitrogen (fertilizer) application. High-resolution climate data (2 km grid) are now available through a CTC-based Web interface, and can be accessed by a computer model to precisely estimate an individual farmer’s nitrogen needs.  Soil spectral sensing methods have been developed for rapid soil assessment. Weed-crop competition models and economic decision models have been developed, and agricultural data sets are mined.  Researchers also gained better understanding of the greenhouse gas implications of nitrogen fertilizer application.