LS News Staff (Amy Burtch)

Focus on Lagoon Management

Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Operations Research Sara Shashaani and Associate Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Extension Specialist Mahmoud Sharara have partnered with the Ag Analytics Platform for their project, “Uncertainty Quantification for Robust Irrigation and Lagoon Management in Farms.” The research is part of a larger externally funded project investigating better management practices for hog lagoons. 

With 1,500 storage lagoons in eastern North Carolina, an area boasting the state’s highest pig production, this project is essential to supporting new solutions for a critical economic enterprise for the state. 

Shashaani and Sharara want to create a model that can help predict the nitrogen concentration in the soil of storage lagoons, which can be impacted by weather and lagoon management and irrigation practices. According to Sharara, understanding the nitrogen concentration of the lagoons determines how much manure a farmer can apply and when to apply it. 

“With the assistance of SAS Viya and Brad’s Ag Analytics Platform team, we are using data sets and machine learning tools to figure out how to simulate that concentration over time,” Sharara says. 

SAS has helped by organizing and analyzing the data, and then arriving at an AI-based model, allowing the research team to predict nitrogen concentration at different times of the year. This AI-based model can be integrated into the team’s larger model, enabling them to run “what if” scenarios to analyze farms over extended periods of time. 

The team has also used the AI-based model to see how changes in the data affect its predictions, helping make the model — and its recommendations — more reliable in an uncertain, changing environment.

The ability to update AI-based models in an automated manner with new collections of weather and farm data is an aspiration that the team has pursued in this collaboration with SAS and the Ag Analytics Platform.

“Partnering with SAS has been an interesting and rewarding process of mutual learning because we are teaching one another about the system,” Shashaani says. 

With each project it supports — from improving sustainability and profitability to engaging farmers in best management practices — the N.C. Agricultural Analytics Platform is shaping the future of agriculture.