The agriculture industry faces tremendous pressure to increase crop production and yields to meet future consumer demand for food. This problem is compounded by population growth, limited natural resources, unpredictable weather, the requirement of sustainability, and climate change. In an effort to make farms more productive, growers are increasingly turning to environmental measurements and data analysis. Computing systems can automate this process--facilitating faster problem diagnosis, more accurate outcome prediction, and proactive decision making. Unfortunately, to date such systems have received little attention from the computer science research community and extant solutions are proprietary, complex, costly, or not widely available.

This July, Prof. Chandra Krintz of UCSB Computer Science Department, gave a presentation titled "SmartFarms: Using IoT to turn Analytics into Farm Implements" at the Science and Engineering Council of Santa Barbara. "Our aim is to leverage advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) as part of a holistic system called SmartFarm, " said Prof. Krintz, "By integrating environmental sensor technologies, SmartFarm will provide growers with a secure, easy to use, low-cost data analysis and visualization system. The end result will be data-informed decisions that lead to increased productivity."