USDA and Microsoft Innovation Challenge for food resilience

  • Ann M. Bartuska, Brian Lutz, and Lucas Joppa | United States Department of Agriculture, Independent Farmer, Microsoft Research

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Microsoft are sponsoring the Innovation Challenge, a competition to develop data-driven software applications that help visualize and explore how climate change will affect the resiliency of food systems in the United States. Challenge participants will have access to a Microsoft Azure cloud-based data portal hosting key USDA datasets on agricultural practices and outcomes that span the past 100 years, enabling participants to investigate how food systems of tomorrow will be different from today.

The challenge offers prizes for applications that use the USDA data and provide actionable insights to farmers, agriculture businesses, scientists, or consumers across the United States so that they can plan for how current and future climate changes might influence food systems.

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