In Ireland, Origin Enterprises plc and Science Foundation Ireland committed €17.6 million to establish a dedicated digital, precision agriculture and crop science collaborative research partnership with University College Dublin. The five-year program is intended to build digitally-based and user-driven advisory tools that provide rapid decision support for agronomists and farmers.
The collaboration combines UCD’s expertise in data science and agricultural science with Origin’s integrated crop management research, systems capabilities and extensive on-farm knowledge exchange networks. Key to the development will be the creation of a scalable crop intelligence platform, which will incorporate consistent and real time data analytical approaches to optimize sustainable crop performance.
Professor Mark Ferguson, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland said, “The proposed integrated crop model will have global implications in the sustainable production of crops, addressing the challenge of food production for a rapidly expanding global population.”