Digital Agriculture

As a land-grant institution, the University of Illinois has always had a strong agricultural focus with a reputation for engineering excellence that’s known around the world. Through the Center for Digital Agriculture, we merge those strengths, using new advances in data and automation to increase productivity, profitability and sustainability in farming.

Our award-winning faculty affiliates lead major National Science Foundation-funded and other projects uniting agricultural, biological, food, and environmental researchers with great minds in computer science, electrical, and other engineering fields to bring solutions to the farming world’s greatest challenges.

Center for Digital Agriculture

The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign helps agricultural producers, researchers and industries keep pace with the ways technology is transforming how we feed and support a growing global population. Increased global productivity and sustainability requires technical innovations that involve CDA’s primary themes: Automation, Data, Animals and Crops, and People in Agriculture.

Explore Center for Digital Agriculture

NCSA Spotlight

Dr. Elizabeth Ainsworth
Adjunct Professor, Department of Plant Biology

Professor Ainsworth is a plant physiologist who studies crop responses to global climate change.

Climate change is a defining challenge of our time and NCSA is enabling research that improves understanding and modeling of crop responses to climate change.

Project Highlights

AIFARMS

From autonomous farming to livestock optimization, artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role in the life of the modern family farm. Learn how we’re shaping the future of farming with this important project, led by the Center for Digital Agriculture.

COALESCE

For years fertilizers and other chemicals have been broadly applied, leading to a long list of problems. Learn about the $7-million initiative designed to change that, using machine learning, AI, and advanced computing to make farming far more sustainable.

All Project Highlights