Research Proposal Presentation Title

A case study for big data analysis systems implemented on farms in the United States of America

Student researchers

Zhimu Zhou, Zehao Feng, Junchao Wang

What is your research question?

How will the growing use of digital agriculture practices increase the efficiency of water use?

Research proposal keywords or concepts

Digital agriculture, Water resources, Sustainability

How would you summarize your proposed research idea?

Our project would include the research on the advantages of popularizing digital agricultural technologies in saving fresh water and further investigating the bigger challenges for integrating big data systems in farms across the United States. To achieve our research goal, we designed a questionnaire for American farmers to collect their attitudes and concerns about using big data to manage digital farming technologies, and to further study their better implementation.

Where is the literature gap and how does your proposed research attempt to fill that gap?

1. Most scholars focused on specific irrigation technologies but did not include the effect of including big data on these technologies for water management.

2. Our research will begin with an introduction to the importance of digital farming for conserving freshwater resources, and then build on this to investigate the reasons for the low uptake of digital irrigation technologies, which is another research gap.

Why is this gap worthy of research?

The lack of academic research on big data farm management technology in agricultural water devices is considered as one of the reasons for the decline in the prevalence of digital agriculture in the United States (Basso & Antle, 2020).

What future change could this research possibly contribute to, related to sustainability?

While 71% of the earth is covered by water, the freshwater resources available to people are very limited. Research on how to reduce water consumption without compromising the quality of crops is an important topic for the sustainability of the earth's natural resources.

What made your group interested in and/or what excites you about your proposed topic?

As the world' s population grows, agricultural production is expected to grow by 60% over the next few decades, with the potential for a shortage of freshwater (ContentEngine LLC, 2021). Unlike what we thought at the beginning, the industry that consumes the most freshwater resources is agriculture rather than people's daily consumption. Fortunately, the development of technology has been sophisticated enough to reduce the waste of resources caused by manual operation in the agricultural process. However, such technology was not widespread on farms in the United States which intrigued us and eventually drove us to propose this academic research.

References

Basso, B., & Antle, J. (2020). Digital agriculture to design sustainable agricultural systems. Nature Sustainability, 3(4), 254-256. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0510-0

Translated by ContentEngine LLC. (2021, ). Irrigation, vertical agriculture and digital solutions to efficiently use water, a critical input. CE Noticias Financieras Retrieve from: https:// search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/2484111711? accountid=14656&pq-origsite=summon