Thought for Food

Sustainably feeding people, improving livelihoods and protecting the environment are among the most significant challenges of our time. Making meaningful contributions to address these challenges requires systems-level thinking and an interdisciplinary, holistic approach.

Digital agriculture (DA) provides the conceptual and operational foundations to drive innovation and tackle challenges at scale – farm, region, nation, globe — and to integrate solutions and evaluate impact across the technical, social, economic, policy and environmental dimensions of agriculture.

For anyone who eats and needs a plentiful, nutritious, and sustainable food supply.

Radical, elegant and sustainable solutions from an array of disciplines – biology, engineering, computing and information science, and business, to name a few – will be necessary to meet the challenges of the coming decades.

Cornell is the only Ivy League and Land-Grant university with a strong mission to educate and support agricultural communities in New York and the world via programs that create new knowledge and new practices. The combined passions and talents of Cornell’s world-renowned researchers manifest in transformational knowledge, technologies and a new generation of leaders and educational outreach and extension services.

CIDA’s mission is to create a dynamic ecosystem of scholars, teachers, practitioners and stakeholders that inspires learning, catalyzes innovation, and integrates fundamental discoveries across the life sciences, engineering, computing and social sciences to advance more sustainable agriculture and food systems.

Our vision is to foster continuous discovery, innovation and dialogue to create sustainable agriculture and food systems while inspiring new frontiers in science, policy and practice.