By Adrienne Berard
An unusually mild winter followed by a wet spring made last year one of the worst in a decade for Pennsylvania soybean growers. It wasn't the soybeans that were the problem; it was the slugs. The pests survived the warm winter to lay a second round of eggs, and twice as many slugs hatched in the spring of 2024 as the year before. The slugs ate so many seedlings that some growers had to replant three times.
"You'll see the forecast, and it's weather we aren't used to," said Paul Esker, professor of epidemiology and field crop pathology in the College of Agricultural Sciences. "Uncertainty has increasingly become a bigger part of farming. It's just the world we've been dealing with for the last several years."
As climate change accelerates and threats from pests and diseases intensify, Esker is part of a growing cohort of Penn State researchers developing innovative solutions to help crops not only survive but also thrive. Through breakthroughs in biotechnology, modeling, and precision agriculture, scientists are designing tools and systems that build plant resilience from the ground up.
"As a land-grant university, our mission is to take on the challenges growers face every day and deliver real-world solutions to better serve the people of Pennsylvania," said Troy Ott, Peter and Ann Tombros Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences. "Our researchers are developing technologies to help farmers increase yields, protect our natural resources, and stay resilient in a changing world."
Battling Crop Threats with Data
As farmers face increasingly unpredictable growing conditions, Esker has pulled together an interdisciplinary team of experts to tackle this existential problem of uncertainty. The team developed the Open Crop Manager, a web-based platform and mobile app that enables farmers, consultants, and extension educators to document and scout crop conditions as well as make field observations with spatial and temporal precision. The data then are fed into machine learning and predictive modeling to calculate how diseases and pests could impact crop yields.
The complex models analyze agricultural data across multiple states, helping farmers make more informed decisions about crop management, pest control, and resource allocation, Esker said. The platform is free, supported by commodity board funding. It is designed to help farmers while also providing researchers and policymakers with large-scale insights into agricultural patterns and potential risks to the nation's food supply.
Source : psu.edu