Center for Digital Agriculture
New center combines campus’ areas of expertise in engineering and agriculture to cement Illinois’ position as an innovator in this emerging field of agricultural technology and develop solutions to agricultural problems that use digital technology.
When the Center for Digital Agriculture launched in October 2019, UIUC Chancellor Robert Jones said, “This new center will serve as a hub for collaborative research across a broad spectrum of engineering and agricultural disciplines within our university and with collaborators across the globe. The discoveries and innovations that come out of the center will continue the Illinois tradition of being the birthplace of transformations in the way we live, think, and learn with digital technologies.”
The $20 million AIFARMS award from the National Science Foundation is just the beginning of those discoveries and innovation. A collaboration between The Grainger College of Engineering, the College of Agricultural, Consumer, & Environmental Sciences, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Institute for Genomic Biology, the center leverages Illinois’ historic land-grant pillars of agriculture and engineering and position both to work in tandem towards a digital future.
By combining top-tier programs in both engineering and agriculture, Illinois is uniquely placed to take the lead in such multidisciplinary research. This, in turn, allows the center to go further than simply deploying and applying digital improvements. Instead, its focus will be on the collaborative process of researching and developing new digital techniques and tools to address agricultural problems.
***