CC* Planning: Precision Agriculture and the Community

Water shortages in California, Arizona, and Nevada will impact crop yield and agriculture in the region for years to come. By further advancing farming innovations in Yuma, Arizona along the Colorado River, the prospects of sustainable growth, improved research potential, and new infrastructure collaborations benefit STEM programs, industry, and the community.

Yuma is Arizona’s Salad Bowl. The continued introduction of specialized networking and collaborations with higher education and K-12 institutions in the area improves the opportunity to plan and implement broadband and networking aligned with the science of agriculture. The use of technology to improve crop yields, or precision agriculture, is a required step forward in the deployment of cyberinfrastructure in rural communities.

The planning effort to improve networking, connect science-oriented programs, and experiment with homework gap services is led by Sun Corridor Network in collaboration with Yuma’s agricultural research community, community college service and agricultural programs, Yuma’s largest elementary and high school programs, the University of Arizona’s experimental farms and regional academic organization, and the desert agricultural research organization. The Yuma collaboration planning activities will improve community-based cyberinfrastructure models, inform the next generation of agricultural infrastructure, and bridge science, engineering, and technology programs by addressing the complex needs of the business and science of agriculture.

The Yuma Collaboration introduces broadband and infrastructure planning in support of precision agriculture during a period of extreme drought and the impacts of water shortages.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.