Briefs

Sep 26, 2002. Monsanto Company announced yesterday it will transfer its complete precision agriculture database to the University of Illinois. The university will then make the database available online to other US-based ag institutions and their researchers at www.farmopt.org.

"When a farmer turns to the University of Illinois for crop recommendations, our specialists usually offer up very general responses. But what we'd like to do is give very specific recommendations down to conditions at field level or even lower," says Robert Easter, dean of the U of I College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. "This Monsanto dataset is an important research tool to help us develop very precise recommendations that help farmers become more profitable and even better stewards of the land."

Scientists with the Automated Learning Group (ALG) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will use an innovative data-mining tool called Data to Knowledge (D2K) on the precision agriculture database. D2K is a visual programming environment used to create data analysis applications and conduct data analysis.

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