UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences invites collaborators from within and beyond the University to join it as it embarks on a new initiative focused on leveraging emerging and advanced technologies to support sustainable and resilient agricultural systems and the broader living systems that support them.
As part of the launch, the college will host the “Technologies for Agriculture and Living Systems Symposium,” set for May 7-8 at the University Park campus. This event will spotlight research across the University that supports advanced technologies to enhance food production, health and conservation and elaborate on how the Technologies for Agriculture and Living Systems Initiative could redefine agroecosystems in the commonwealth and beyond.
According to László Kulcsár, interim dean of the college, the new initiative offers a holistic approach that addresses the pressing need for integrated agroecosystems to withstand climate challenges, limited resource availability, biodiversity losses, and socioeconomic shifts within rural and urban communities.
The college is committed to bridging the gap between discovery and application, Kulcsár noted, emphasizing the college’s history of bringing together diverse audiences — such as industry stakeholders, producer and conservation networks, academia, and government — to align expertise and resources in tackling complex issues, in the best traditions of the land-grant mission.
“This initiative is rooted in our 150-year commitment to answering the state’s agricultural and natural resource needs and expands on the expertise and capacity that we have been building for some time,” he said. “With this symposium, we welcome partners to join us in this shared mission to leverage the college’s domain expertise and Penn State’s interdisciplinary infrastructure to bring our stakeholder networks into the conversation to promote economic and workforce development.”
Kulcsár emphasized that the initiative’s success will rely on collaborations formed at events such as the symposium. These collaborations will be important when pursuing competitive funding that supports coordinating a statewide network, developing prototypes that seed small businesses and startups, and establishing sustainable pathways to implementing and adopting these technologies.
Currently, faculty in the college use technology and artificial intelligence to monitor, manage and model various aspects of agriculture and environmental health, such as plant diseases, biodiversity, animal health, forest quality, water and habitat quality, agricultural production, human nutrition, and food science.
The goal of this initiative is to integrate expertise across agriculture, natural resource conservation and rural health using recently developed tools of predictive modeling, engineering and robotics, data sciences, and artificial intelligence. This cross-disciplinary approach can enhance earth and environmental monitoring systems, decision support systems and education, according to Blair Siegfried, associate dean for research and graduation education.
“With our extensive interdisciplinary expertise in research and education, combined with our statewide Penn State Extension presence and program teams, the college can provide critical insights into the challenges of developing, scaling, producing and adopting technologies for all sizes of farms and for Pennsylvania’s rich and diverse natural resources,” said Siegfried, who serves as director of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station.
He noted the need to advance these technologies for different economies of scale and to develop translatable and customizable solutions for small- and medium-sized farms nationwide, particularly in the Northeast.
“Because Pennsylvania’s diverse agricultural and natural resource sectors operate at the interface of rural and urban populations, this initiative provides the opportunity to position our commonwealth as the nation’s laboratory for living systems where these technologies can be tested, formalized and implemented across the extents of the agroecosystem chain,” Siegfried said.
Christina Grozinger, Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology, is leading the research arm of the initiative. She explained that advances in technology, from artificial intelligence to gene editing, now enable scientists, stakeholders and policymakers to collaborate to tackle local and global challenges.
“These technologies allow us to develop innovative strategies for enhancing agricultural productivity, mitigating climate instability, conserving biodiversity, and improving human health and well-being,” she said.
The symposium also will provide a venue for launching the Technology for Living Systems Center at Penn State. This center was initiated through a National Science Foundation Research Training Grant. It will facilitate collaboration with complementary expertise within these systems and lay a framework for future engagement across the University, peer institutions, industry, and state and federal agencies.
“This integration will require advancements in research and the development of new technologies,” Grozinger said. “We must build workforce development to sustain a robust pipeline for the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists, agricultural producers and conservationists.”
Grozinger and her collaborators from the colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Engineering, and Earth and Mineral Sciences have initiated innovative graduate training programs through the Technology for Living Systems Center. She said the symposium will be an opportunity to expand on this framework by exploring educational and training collaborations to ensure a skilled workforce and promote economic development in the food and natural resources sectors.
More information about the Technologies for Agriculture and Living Systems Initiative and the symposium can be found online.