Tag Archives: difm

Paula Girón named International Plant Nutrition Institute’s (IPNI) 31 Scholar Award recipient

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DIFM graduate researcher Paula Girón was named one of the International Plant Nutrition Institute’s (IPNI) 31 Scholar Award recipients. The IPNI awards graduate students in countries with an IPNI program in science programs relevant to plant nutrition science and the management of crop nutrients.

Paula Girón is working toward her M.Sc. in soil since at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She is working on a thesis focusing on site-specific nitrogen management in maize in the northwestern Buenos Aires province. Girón was a visiting scholar with the DIFM project during fall semester of 2016.

First Look at New DIFM Publication

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Professors David Bullock, Maria Boerngen, and Divina Gracia P. Rodriguez just received a first look at their accepted paper in the Agronomy Journal, titled “The Origins, Implications, and Consequences of Yield-Based Nitrogen Fertilizer Management.” Take a look!

Developing an Affordable, Retrofittable Yield Monitor for Cotton

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During a trip to Colombia by Brendan Kuhns, it became clear that yield monitors for cotton are hard to come by, especially the kind that is retrofittable on older machines. Fortunately, DIFM researcher Dr. Tony Grift did his PhD on the development of a generic method for mass flow sensing of granular materials (fertilizers in particular), and he is eager to apply his method to cotton. We will build a new optical photo-interruption arrangement that measures the spacing durations between clumps of cotton passing a sensor. Then we will apply the theory of arrival processes to determine the number of cotton clumps that pass the sensor per unit of time, which is an indirect measure of the mass flow.

What is so fascinating about this method is that it works by only measuring the spacing times in between cotton clumps. So without knowing or measuring any material parameters, we still can measure the mass flow. It gets better: the measurement device does not need calibration, since nature is literally doing the work. If you would like to read details, here are links to paper 1 and paper 2 (the second won an award from the EurAgEng organization).

We hope that this small project will also connect our statisticians with the engineers (no easy feat!). For more information, feel free to read Dr. Grift’s essay titled “Embracing variability: How to hug a cactus”, which he claims to be “loosely based on the brother of our fearless leader David Bullock.”

Figure 1 Shown is the mass flow sensing scenario; we have clumps of material (cotton balls) and we measure the spacing durations among them. Believe it or not, using Poisson driven arrival theory, these data are sufficient to determine how many clumps are passing the sensor per unit of time, irrespective or the overlapping effect. Isn’t statistics great?

New Faces at DIFM

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Joshua Babes is an undergraduate at UIUC studying Agricultural and Consumer Economics who is volunteering to work with the Data-Intensive Farm Management project. Joshua comes from the north side of Chicago and is working towards a career in consulting doing data analytics. He hopes to begin to learn more about the analytics while contributing to DIFM. 

DIFM at the Highland Community College Field Day

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Robert Dunker attended the Highland Community College Field Day on August 29, 2018 in Freeport Illinois.  The DIFM Program had a booth to distribute information about farmer recruitment and participation.  Several students and farmers stopped by the booth to learn more about the program and how they could become involved.

DIFM at the ACES Fall Festival

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DIFM participated in the ACES Fall Festival, which invites undergraduate students in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences to come to the U of I Stock Pavilion in order to learn about available opportunities at the College. Groups from the U of I Rodeo Club to the DIFM project had booths at the Fall Festival.

At the Festival, we sought to attract students looking for undergraduate research experiences, and to recruit farm families to join in the project. At present, two students David Bullock met at the Fall Festival are interested in participating in our research, and one farm family has expressed interest in running a trial on their fields.

Applications for Future Funding

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In the fall of 2018, the DIFM project is working with collaborators around the globe to ensure continued funding for our work. At present, we have turned in applications to CGIAR and to the Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Extension Grant. We’re hoping to hear back on these applications in the coming months!

DIFM 2018 Recruitment

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DIFM hosted several farmer recruitment meetings at the DIFM House in South Campus over Spring 2018. As a consequence of these meetings, with both new contacts and to follow up with past participants, we gained three new farmer-participants in Illinois, two in New York, two in Washington, and one in Kansas. In addition, several past participants decided to expand our project onto additional fields!

DIFM at the 14th International Conference on Precision Agriculture

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Laila Puntel, of Iowa State University, and Brittani Edge and Aolin Gong, of the University of Illinois, presented at the 14th International Conference on Precision Agriculture in Montreal. Puntel stated, “It was great to see such a big community from all over the world…people from Australia, Germany, Belgium, South America, Canada, and US.”

In order to collaborate internationally, scientists from Curtin University in Australia organized a consortium for on-farm experimentation, to which Puntel was invited. This partnership will allow the DIFM project to be connected with OFE in different countries.


Montana State University- and University of Montana-based researchers affiliated with DIFM also shared their research: Amy Peerlinck, John Sheppard, and Bruce Maxwell gave a presentation titled “Using Deep Learning in Yield and Protein Prediction of Winter Wheat Based on Fertilization Prescriptions in Precision Agriculture,” and Bruce Maxwell, Paul Hegedus, Anton Bekkerman, Robert Payn, John Sheppard, Nicholas Silverman, and Clemente Izurieta gave a presentation titled, “Can Optimization Associated with On-Farm Experimentation Using On-Farm Experimentation Using Site-Specific Technologies Improve Producer Management Decisions?”