Farmer and UMES researcher react, USDA call to develop AI tools for crop resilience

Snow Hill, Md. – Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture called on universities and various stakeholders to help build new AI tools to accelerate crop innovation. On Maryland’s Lower Shore, farmers and researchers are reacting.

Virgil Shockley has farmed in Worcester County for decades. As he tends his specialty-bred roses and other crops that have been bred to be more resilient over the years, he says using AI to accelerate crop resiliency is inevitable.

“As far as predicting things, whether you have corn crop, bean crop, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “We feed the world, the United States feeds the world, and the world looks to us as far as innovation.”

Dr. Alfadhl Alkhaled is an assistant professor in precision agriculture at the Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Sciences at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and he has researched the use of AI to analyze satellite imagery and field data.

In an email statement he sent to WMDT, he said he believes the USDA’s initiative represents an important step into using AI to turn vast amounts of data into meaningful insights farmers can use.

“Ultimately, these advances have the potential to support the development of more resilient and productive crops and provide better decision-support tools for farmers,” Alkhaled said.

However, with the high demands data centers put on the energy grid and the high volume of water needed to prevent overheating, Shockley said innovation also has to be balanced with its costs.

According to Shockely, the key to that isn’t blocking the development of data centers, but determining what their development looks like.

“So that you don’t have the high electric bills and that the centers, are the people that are building the centers, produce the electricity that they need in order to do it,” he said.