iee.psu.edu/news/podcast/growing-impact-feeding-changing-world">December episode of "Growing Impact" highlights an innovative project revolutionizing farming practices in Africa and beyond - PlantVillage. Leveraging the power of smartphones, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, PlantVillage has become a lifeline for millions of farmers across Africa, Asia and the Americas. It helps them combat plant diseases, pests and the challenges posed by climate change. Initially funded by the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the project received additional support through a 2016 seed grant from the Institute of Energy and the Environment. This funding aimed to enhance PlantVillage's ability to function as a digital version of a U.S. land-grant extension professional.
When the project's lead, David Hughes, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security, came to Penn State in 2011, he said he knew very little about the U.S. land-grant universities.
"I was blown away on day one," he said. "It's a unique university system that was established here in this country to do applied research, education and extension work. I wanted to provide these resources that we have here in Happy Valley to the world. I knew this was possible because of major investments by Google and others into AI and cloud computing that integrated into smartphones. I wanted to combine Happy Valley and Silicon Valley."
Hughes highlighted a shortage of human expertise in African crop production and why AI in standard smartphones is so promising.
"The ratio between extension workers and farmers is maybe one extension worker for 3,000 farmers, or sometimes 12,000 farmers," he said. "But in every village, there is a smartphone. So, we developed AI systems inside the phone to work offline that are either as good as human experts or better."
Another agricultural issue is pest management. PlantVillage has assisted farmers with devastating challenges like locust swarms and the fall armyworm, which is an invasive caterpillar that can severely impact corn crops.
"We created a commercial enterprise where locals are selling the solution, which is a biological control," he said. "It's a little wasp that you put out in the field that find and kill the caterpillars. We've seen early results showing that when farmers disperse this parasitoid wasp, they're seeing a 55% increase in their yields."
Hughes said the beneficial wasp program, which is part of the USAID Current and Emerging Threats to Crops Innovation Lab that Hughes oversees, has produced over 180 million parasitoid wasps. In addition to being a pest solution, the program is creating jobs for the people who are producing the biological control agents.
In addition to pest control, PlantVillage addresses the larger-scale threats posed by climate change, helping farmers adapt to extreme weather conditions while also mitigating its impact.
Hughes is developing a spin-off company, called PlantVillage+. It develops solutions for a climate-changed world in close partnership with Penn State, which would provide powerful research and development support.
One of the efforts of PlantVillage+ is a program to capture and bury carbon in the ground. Through a process that heats agricultural waste to create charcoal (known as biochar), farmers capture carbon and return it to the soil, enriching it for future crops and reducing atmospheric carbon. It also provides an opportunity to sell carbon credits to the rest of the world.
"Now we can go to a company like Microsoft or an individual in the United States and say, 'You're producing pollution. Let me help you pay for your pollution,'" Hughes said. "Then they pay PlantVillage+, and we take out the carbon. We're removing the carbon but also helping you reduce emissions overall."
"Growing Impact" is a podcast by the Institute of Energy and the Environment. It features Penn State researchers who have been awarded IEE seed grants and discusses their foundational work as they further their projects. The podcast is available on multiple platforms, including YouTube, Apple, Amazon and Spotify.
