A team of researchers and regional industry partners led by the University of Arkansas has been awarded a federal grant of up to $5 million to continue development of Cultivate IQ, an AI-driven platform designed to empower smaller farms and strengthen the resiliency of regional food systems.
The platform integrates sales and production data from across the farm-to-market supply chain to help plan and manage regional food supplies, the U of A said in a news release. Local food buyers, including aggregators and distributors, host their growers on the platform, extending access to market insights, production planning tools, and purchase orders.
By providing greater access to meaningful data, producers can better match food supply and demand, according to the release. Avoiding overproduction and underproduction minimizes food loss and can have a positive economic impact on smaller farms by opening up new market channels.
“Our global food system is fragile and disruption in the system is a national security concern,” Meredith Adkins, the project’s principal investigator and an assistant professor at the U of A’s Institute for Integrative and Innovative Research, said in a statement. “Small and mid-sized farms and mission-driven local food distributors, such as food hubs, play an important role in strengthening our regional food systems, but they face real barriers including access to real-time marketplace insights such as pricing, supply, and demand.
“Cultivate IQ aims to enable these end users to compete more effectively by making regionally relevant data insights more accessible.”
The award from the National Science Foundation brings the total investment in the project to nearly $6 million. Funds come from the federal agency’s Convergence Accelerator program, which launched in 2019 with the goal of turning basic research and discovery into practice using innovative processes, such as human-centered design, user discovery and team science.
The Cultivate IQ research team is comprised of researchers from across the University of Arkansas System, the University of Florida, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and local industry partners Cureate and Junction AI.
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