Roadmap Development for Soil Health & Soil-borne Diseases with Earth Knowledge and USDA

With a goal of providing a predictive Decision Tool to growers based on “Smart Data” Analytics, YCEDA underwrote a Roadmapping project by the director of the USDA National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment and Earth Knowledge, an accomplished data analytics company. This roadmap has focused on existing research, data, technology, and predictive tools in the specialty crop industry. It has evolved into a collaboration with YCEDA growers providing pairs of fields and historical and real-time data so that disease triggers can be analyzed and predicted. Cutting edge sensors and other technology have been deployed to collect in-field data. We believe this project will lead to significant grants and other funding to explore factors that affect productivity. Ultimately, this research should provide a decision tool to help growers make agronomic decisions such as planting decisions, soil preparation, irrigation management, pesticide treatments, yield estimation, harvest timing, and other production decisions that will maximize productivity and profits. The completed roadmap lays out the USDA's most useful technology and research which may be incorporated into Earth Knowledge's decision support tools for mitigating soil-borne disease affecting fresh produce.