Providing farmers with resilient technical, personal, and leadership practices to mitigate extreme weather can potentially reduce farmer anxiety and stress. The Multidisciplinary Extreme Weather Toolkit for Small-scale and BIPOC Farmers Research Team at NC A& T includes faculty in computer engineering, agricultural safety and health, leadership, counseling, regenerative soil science, and includes working with qualitative data as well as big data like that from NOA. This research aims to provide insight into the communication and interpersonal variables affecting farmer resilience and to pilot live trainings, and, machine learning mobile applications with natural language responsiveness to assist farmers with decisions affecting their farm practices, communities, and personal lives.
The project uses three sample cohorts of farmers:
Cohort A: Live linear discipline cohort
Cohort B: Multidisciplinary cohort
Cohort C: Random sample mobile cohort
Cohort A and Cohort B will continue to be tracked to note mobile app engagement specific to their cohorts. Data from all three Cohorts will be analyzed for qualitative responses and insight.
We will be sharing how the SAS Viya platform is assisting us with achieving and implementing robust transdisciplinary analysis, including interfacing with big public data as well as hyper-localized farm and farmer specific qualitative input, and, how our research model demonstrates a means forward for transdisciplinary teams across disparate disciplines.
Our research is in process and we will have some preliminary qualitative results to share by summer 2024, and, demonstrate how we are interfacing these qualitative results with big public data to chart a course of machine learning/mobile application and live trainings.
The implications include incorporating qualitative and quantitative data, site specific analyses, and farmer specific responses and responsiveness to curate machine learning mobile applications to provide hand-held live or near real time decision options for farmers regarding their personal, farm practice, and community well-being.
In short, this means that rather than waiting to find out options from experts, or, rather than wading through endless options, farmers can be connected in real or nearly real time to resources through their mobile phones for: their mental health, addressing issues on their farm, gaining skills to build community response or resilience, and, these options are not siloed, but potentially interacting and provided in a menu of potential and tailored best next options or current preferred options for farmer, farm-family, farm, and farm community well-being.
- Indicates paper has been withdrawn from meeting
- Indicates an Award Winner