US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced the Agriculture Innovation Agenda, a department-wide initiative to align resources, programs, and research to position American agriculture to better meet future global demands. Specifically, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will stimulate innovation so that American agriculture can achieve the goal of increasing production by 40% while cutting the environmental footprint of US agriculture in half by 2050. The first component of the Ag Innovation Agenda is to develop a US ag-innovation strategy that aligns and synchronizes public and private sector research. Research areas of focus include genome design; digitalization and automation; prescriptive intervention; and systems-based farm management. The second component is to align the work of USDA customer-facing agencies and integrate innovative technologies and practices into USDA programs. The third component is to conduct a review of USDA productivity and conservation data. USDA already closely tracks data on yield, but on […]