Watching the Crops Grow

This article presents an insight into innovations in the field of bioenergy crops. In order to get the most biofuel from the least land, farmers must maximize the yield of raw plant material per acre per year, while using a minimum of fertilizer and chemicals. To rapidly develop crops that do so, sorghum breeders and other scientists want to identify the traits or phenotypes that predict which plants will be biggest and have the most biomass to convert into fuel. Such phenotypes may include early season growth rates, the number of leaves on a plant, how well it uses soil nutrients, and many more. Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture-funded team plan to monitor a diverse array of genes and traits in thousands of individual sorghum plants from the ground and the air. They are using robots, UAVs, sensing technologies, and big data to make that happen. In order to monitor crops from the ground, both the Purdue team and Clemson University’s ARPA-E BOOST team are developing self-driving, instrument-equipped bots or vehicles that steer themselves through a breeding plot without trampling plants.