The University of Tennessee’s Institute of Agriculture is establishing a new research center with the goal of developing innovative computer technologies to support farmers in the state: The Tennessee Center for Agricultural Innovation. The UT Board of Trustees has appropriated $3.1 million a year in recurring funding for the center.
Keith Carver is in his third year as senior vice chancellor and senior vice president of the UTIA, where he oversees the UT Extension division, AgResearch, the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Herbert College of Agriculture. WUOT News sat down with him to discuss his plans for the Center for Agricultural Innovation and the state of farming in Tennessee in 2025.
This interview and transcript have been edited for length and clarity.
Pierce Gentry: You've been in your role as senior vice chancellor for the Institute of Agriculture for a couple of years now, right? Can you give us a breakdown of some work that you've done that you're most proud of in the last couple of years?
Keith Carver: A couple of things. One is this work for the last decade – but really the last 18 months – of getting the brand new Agriculture and Natural Resources Building opened. And the other piece that I'm really excited about is the work we've done to address land loss across the state in terms of farmland and forest and timber. Tennessee's third in the country in terms of average farmland loss, and our most recent study that our ag economics program just put out is we're losing about 10 acres of farmland an hour in Tennessee.
And so our group of researchers and economists have really been working with the state, [and] Tennessee Farm Bureau to try to figure out what are the best ways to slow that down, and how can we make more people aware? You know Pierce, if we don't do that right now, we can't go another five or 10 years and lose even more ground which can produce food and fuel and fiber. So it's important work.
So to that end, the [UT] Board of Trustees appropriated just over $3 million for a new initiative helmed by the Institute of Agriculture. It's the Tennessee Center for Agricultural Innovation. Can you tell me a little bit about this center?
Absolutely and really, what it's about is using predictive modeling, data analytics, computation, looking at trends over time and applying that to how we're feeding our animals. We've got some great intellectual firepower here and great capacity to attack these sorts of problems, but with the help of the State of Tennessee, we can do even more.
Can you break down the $3.1 million price tag for us?
It's researchers, but also infrastructure too. What we need now is we need a few more of those world class researchers, but we also need technology upgrades to match these facilities that we have, and taking agriculture and farming and food production and food security into the digital age. And so certainly some more experts and faculty and research work, but also the technology to help us get over the hump.
Your pitch to the board mentioned ag-applied AI, right? Now, AI is something new and novel for a lot of people. It can spook some people. How does the Institute of Agriculture feel AI can be applied in an agricultural setting?
You go in and you can place a tag on a cow, and daily it comes in, and as it comes into the parlor to be milked it takes their weight. It can do things like take temperature. It can look at how much that certain cow ate that day. It looks at milk production, the length of time that it stayed in the stall.
What's great about it is all this data is fed into a computer. The computer – based on monitoring how much food the cows eating and how much they're producing – can also send an email to the farmer – to the researcher – and say, ‘hey, this cow has fallen off in terms of weight and how much milk it's producing, how much it's eating. This cow may be sick.’
So you're learning so much about this cow; But not only the single cow, but an entire herd. And then [you’re] able to use that digital information you're getting to see, ‘okay, do we need to be investing in this type,’ or ‘is there another type we need to be looking at?’
I mean, it's just absolutely fascinating.
So y'all are hoping to do research to find solutions. What do you think are the biggest challenges facing Tennessee farmers in 2025 and why?
Sure. The biggest challenge they have now is they're losing money. Profitability and inputs for farming have gone up so high, and Pierce, if you look at this year we project – our ag economists project – that when you look at soybeans, corn, cotton, wheat, Tennessee's farmers are going to be at about a $420 million loss this year. So you compound that with last year, which was not a good year, and there was about a $300 million loss, so over $700 million in the last two years.
The second piece is Tennessee farmers are aging. The average age for a farmer in Tennessee right now is 59. A lot of young people are not taking up that mantle because it's hard work. And they see their parents and grandparents not being able to make any money. And so if you can help farming become profitable, you'll get those younger groups.
So yeah, the last couple of years have been pretty difficult for farmers in Tennessee. Obviously, last year we had Hurricane Helene wipe out a lot of farms here in East Tennessee. And then this year they've been faced with a really uncertain international market. How can the Institute of Agriculture work to ensure that Tennessee's farmers remain successful during this uncertain time?
Two big ways, I see. One is through technology and training so that these businesses – these small businesses, or large businesses, industries – can keep up with the latest technology and make it an efficient business and save some money and be able to be profitable. The other piece is really being an advocate.
The farmers have long been sort of beating the drum for the importance of agriculture, but I think just getting every family around their table to really be thinking about where their food comes from, and be willing to become new advocates for ag and natural resources. And so I think through our programs, that's what we try to do.
So when do you all hope to have this Center for Innovation up and running?
We are already taking steps. I mean, obviously we're doing a lot with precision agriculture, a lot with using AI as it looks at data around row crops and animals. So we'll continue to accelerate that. I think with the introduction of state funding and the state support we're asking for, we would just ramp up even faster. So we're committed to this. We're committed to technology and making farming profitable again, but the influx of new resources would allow us to do it quicker and better. But we're still going to be about the work anyway.
The University of Tennessee is a major financial supporter of WUOT.
