Last summer, Washington experienced a record-breaking heatwave. The three-day stretch of scorching heat not only had a catastrophic effect on the state’s residents, but also its crops, thus impacting the food supply. I recorded 116 degrees at my house on June 28th, 2021. I saw news reports of entire fields of potatoes and cherries being destroyed, and fruits that stopped growing from the unusually high temperatures. With so much devastation to farmers, I began wondering how farmers are going to cope with the inevitability of future heat waves. To study this issue in more detail, I sought out datasets that would help me analyze the impact of extreme heat on crops … After visiting an apple orchard in Grandview located in Eastern Washington, I learned about different sensor measurements, such as sap flow, soil moisture, and leaf temperature. I talked to several farmers who told me their struggles in managing irrigation during the unbearable heat in the summer months. One farmer told me he had no scientific way of knowing when to irrigate. I realized farmers needed an effective way of collecting and synthesizing data from various sensors. I began working with researchers at Washington State University (WSU) and an innovative startup called innov8.ag to collect data from IoT (Internet of Things) sensors as well as drone and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) imagery from the Honeycrisp apple orchard.

Currently, two-thirds of the global population experiences water scarcity. One-fifth of the world population currently lives in conditions of physical water scarcity, where there is not enough water to meet their demands, and one-quarter of the world’s population experiences economic water scarcity, where their region has enough water to meet the necessary personal, agricultural, environmental, and industrial needs, but lack sustainable accessibility. Existing literature determined that water scarcity occurred more often in areas where irrigation systems had low water productivity (WP) and water use efficiency (WUE), primarily caused by a lack of sufficient irrigation scheduling technology. To fully address the issue, aiding water scarcity in many regions requires proper technological innovation to manage available resources rather than drawing from new ones … Many students think that every research project needs to be some Nobel Prize level worth endeavor, but everyone must start somewhere. When conducting research, no matter the topic or complexity, every experience is something to learn from. As my school research teacher used to remind us, when starting out, it is important to remember that every master was once a beginner. The best way to start is to explore. My advice to any beginning researcher would be to stay curious, develop your knowledge base, pursue your passions, and don’t be afraid about the result. There is no way to guarantee a finding, but by trying, no matter what ends up happening, you end up learning something, and that my friends, is the best feeling in the world …

In the summer prior to my sophomore year, I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article titled “Feeding Billions, a Grain at a Time,” discussing how both rising food prices and climate change threatened decades of progress on global agriculture. Then, a few months later, The New York Times launched an article series called “The Food Chain,” highlighting issues in international agriculture. I found it puzzling that while two prominent newspapers were featuring agriculture coverage, very few people in the United States were aware of global food issues. And that’s when I realized an unfortunate reality of the American people: our country is complacent about its food supply. The federal government’s subsidies to large farms guarantee a stable food supply, leading Americans to take their food security for granted. But upon reading those Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles, I began to formulate the vision that agriculture is the fundamental issue in the developing world . . . Competition between food and fuel is a major obstacle to feeding a world whose population, according to the United Nations, is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. That dynamic encouraged me, for my Intel Science Talent Search project, to research how the use of poplar as a biofuel could avoid displacement of food crops by biofuels…