The researchers behind a new artificial intelligence institute say their work can accelerate the productivity and sustainability of agriculture. The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture are supporting the researchers’ idea with a five-year, $20 million grant to establish an AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture based at Iowa State University.

Rather than tending fields by the hundreds of acres, farmers could one day tend each and every plant with the help of machine learning, robots and other technologies. A five-year, $7 million grant from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture will help researchers develop such a cyber-physical system. The project is led by Soumik Sarkar, the Walter W. Wilson Faculty Fellow in Engineering and an associate professor of mechanical engineering.