By Miles Macclure
From the air, the spring landscape here is a vast expanse of brown farmland stretching out below, ready for farmers to dig in and plant their corn and soybeans, the state’s two top crops. But what flying above Nebraska doesn’t show is the vast network of aquifers and groundwater that supplies those millions of farm acres, a resource that has been threatened in recent years by drought and nitrogen fertilizer contamination.
On the ground at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, faculty and researchers are working on solutions to these problems, while concurrently preparing students for the future of agriculture. The university’s fledgling major, agricultural systems technology, blends hard science, data science, engineering and management.
It’s designed to prepare students for what’s known as precision agriculture, which uses high-tech approaches to farming that can improve both efficiency and environmental impacts. Along with traditional training, this agriculture degree requires an understanding of data science to enable analysis of information from satellite imagery and myriad sensors that collect details on soil health, crop growth and water usage.
Many farmers, especially older ones, have been reluctant to adopt the new practices because they didn’t have the education necessary to interpret the data, according to a 2024 Government Accountability Office report on precision agriculture. If they could take advantage of the new technology, experts say, it might help enable farms to stay in business with less manpower.
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