Twice as Nice: Digital Twins in Corn

FYI: Digital twins are virtual models that replicate environments and objects. These models help researchers do some pretty cool analysis and simulation—without messing up real-world operations.

What does that have to do with ag? A University of Nebraska-Lincoln plant scientist just landed a three-year grant worth almost $1M from the National Science Foundation to develop the first digital twin of a cornfield. This will allow researchers to quickly test scenarios about the performance of the corn: i.e. identifying different hybrids or planting arrangements that could yield the most.

Soundbite: “Once we build these digital twins, we can use high-performance computing to simulate and explore how whole fields of corn with different properties would behave—how resilient they are to wind and how efficiently they use water and capture light, for example—without having to actually grow the cornfield.” — James Schnable, Nebraska Corn Checkoff presidential chair and UNL professor of agronomy and horticulture

Fun fact: UNL was one of the eight institutions to come together to establish the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture in 2021. UNL is also home to state-of-the-art facilities, such as the LemnaTec High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping System. It spits out high-resolution data across a plant’s life cycle, which is used to develop the twin plants.