A $3 million grant has been awarded to a Kansas State University researcher to improve the resilience of smallholder livelihoods through the application of digital and geospatial decision support tools under diverse farming systems.
Associate Agronomy professor Ignacio Ciampitti received the grant from the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sustainable Intensification. He’ll lead the three-year project which involves farming systems experts in the area of crop-livestock integration, modeling, mobile technologies and remote sensing for crop mapping, production and human nutrition.
Ciampitti will lead a consortium of researchers from five U.S. universities, establishing a strong collaboration with team members in Senegal, Cambodia and Bangladesh.
He says the team will focus on strengthening collaboration with industry partners. Initial founding members include Corteva Agriscience, Microsoft, Descartes labs and aWhere.
Ciampitti says the expertise of the consortium team provides critical opportunities for innovation in the digital agriculture space.
“Providing access to simple digital tools to researchers, extension personnel, policymakers and practitioners will allow them to make informed decisions to minimize risk and improve the resilience of people and farming systems,” said Vara Prasad, university distinguished professor and director of the Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab.
“The consortium will seek opportunities for training undergraduate and graduate students in the targeted countries in the main skillset related to data science,” Ciampitti said. “This will be accomplished by establishing more integration between this consortium via SIIL and the primary projects already in place on the targeted countries.”
The Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab is managed by K-State and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development as part of Feed the Future, the government’s global hunger and food security initiative.
