This $1,000,000 project grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310) will fund research to understand perceptions and barriers to adoption of precision livestock farming (PLF) technology in the U.S. swine industry. Michigan State University will lead a team to complete five objectives over five years: 1) establish an advisory board, 2) survey farmers and veterinarians, 3) interview industry influencers, 4)...
This $760,000 Project Grant awarded by the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program will advance the development and validation of an Electrical Impedance Spectroscope (EIS) device as a rapid on-farm decision tool for reproductive management in swine breeding herds. The research and educational activities under this 3-year integrated project will simultaneously improve the EIS...
This $1,150,000 federal Project Grant was awarded on July 1, 2024 by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant's objective is to develop an AI-powered proactive indoor environmental control and management system to optimize swine productivity, welfare, and sustainability. The project will leverage precision livestock farming techniques to collect swine behavior and physiological data, develop AI...
This Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program, CFDA 10.310, provides $125,665 to Iowa State University of Science and Technology to develop an integrated cyber-physical system (CPS) that combines robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced sensing technologies to optimize bird welfare and productivity in poultry production. The project aims to create a holistic monitoring and management system that...
This $1,000,000 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Project Grant awarded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will enable Iowa State University to establish a cyberinfrastructure platform to aggregate and analyze data from swine herds experiencing outbreaks of PRRS virus, a major economic threat to the U.S. pork industry. The project aims to benchmark aspects of outbreak response and recovery, forecast recovery parameters, and provide data-driven decision...
This $1,000,000 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) project grant, awarded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, aims to develop an automated computer system to track piglet nursing patterns and sow behavior in order to identify piglets at risk of pre-weaning mortality. The primary goal is to decrease piglet pre-weaning mortality and improve animal welfare on swine farms. The project will utilize artificial intelligence and computer vision to monitor piglet movement...
Iowa State University received a $300,000 project grant award from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program (CFDA #10.310). The three-year award will support the development of a smartphone application and digital extension activities to automate the identification of lameness in dairy cattle. Specifically, the university will refine a deep learning model to integrate...
This $1,000,000 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) federal grant program will fund the creation and release of reference datasets and benchmarking data to advance the development of computer vision applications in precision livestock farming. Michigan State University is the primary awardee and will work with sub-awardees Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the...
The federal Project Grant award of $800,000 was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program to Iowa State University of Science and Technology. The goal of the project is to identify DNA regulatory regions in livestock species, develop software to catalog and integrate this information with existing genome data, assess the utility of genetic variation within these regulatory regions for genomic breeding methods, and provide...
This $1 million project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program, will develop and implement next-generation syndromic surveillance tools and capabilities for the early detection of threatening agents or diseases to U.S. livestock production. Iowa State University will leverage its existing Swine Disease Reporting System network to refine syndromic...