Revolutionizing Agriculture: The Power of Computational Tools.

Barath Raghavan, an associate professor of computer science at USC Viterbi, is developing computational tools to help farmers design, develop, and manage sustainable farming methods. Raghavan calls this new area of research "computational agroecology," uniting technology and farming expertise to develop diverse agricultural landscapes based on natural ecosystems. In a new paper published in PNAS Nexus, Raghavan and his colleagues propose "a totally new way to think about agriculture and the benefits it can have for research and farming." They reconceptualize agriculture as a search through a "state space," which represents all possible configurations of a system—in this context, agricultural land. This allows agricultural researchers and farmers to explore the different paths and strategies available to increase crop yield, improve sustainability, and discover entirely new combinations of crops that grow well together.