Digital Animal Agriculture

The Digital Animal Agriculture platform aims to position North Carolina as a leader in agricultural innovation by driving the development and adoption of cutting-edge digital technologies, including but not limited to advanced analytics, automation and intelligent systems. We serve as a transdisciplinary team within the Food Animal Initiative (FAI), uniting experts from NC State’s Colleges of Engineering, Sciences, Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Veterinary Medicine. Our goal is to architect a digital ecosystem, fostering the creation of the next generation of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, that enhances the productivity, sustainability and profitability of North Carolina’s diverse food animal systems.

Our mission is to accelerate the digital transformation of agriculture by fostering collaboration between university researchers, state extension agents, and industry partners. We develop and scale solutions in areas such as AI and sensor technology, translating them into practical, field-tested tools and scalable Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms for farmers and the broader agricultural industry. By leading projects within North Carolina’s proposed network of Digital Agriculture Innovation Hubs, we aim to build a skilled workforce and provide the critical infrastructure needed to solve pressing agricultural challenges.

Current Research

The Digital Agriculture Lab

This will focus on applied AI and data analytics to create predictive models and decision-support tools, with a clear path to deployment as robust SaaS applications.

Grant Award: Uncovering the main modes of transmission of HPAI at the farm and barn levels under optimized ventilation

Total Award:  $1,299,434

Led by Dr. Gustavo Machado (CVM-PI) and Dr. Chi-An Yeh (COE), this project aims to uncover the main transmission routes of HPAI to spread between and within commercial poultry farms. We will reconstruct the introduction and dissemination of HPAI at the farm and barn levels, while considering farms’ biosecurity and ventilation systems. The project’s feasibility is based on the fact that we developed and maintained a dashboard named Rapid Access Biosecurity Application (RABapp™), a centralized repository for poultry premises biosecurity and movement data. The union of the RABapp™ database with our disease spread modelling expertise will quantify the main transmission routes, uncover the role of ventilation and biosecurity in the propagation of HPAI to inform biosecurity and response strategies.