UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of researchers at Penn State is aiming to speed up and streamline the collection of important environmental data that impacts the mushroom farming industry through a new digital solution.

Supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Penn State Mushroom Research Center, the team has developed Cropsmarts — a suite of web and mobile software applications integrated with custom-built Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Their aim is to help mushroom farmers more easily and more quickly identify environmental patterns that might influence mushroom crop production.

“We’re working to provide farmers with better data about their mushroom crops. We are capturing all of the crop inputs, measures of environmental factors over the crop cycle and all of the crop outputs,” said Steve Haynes, teaching professor of information sciences and technology and co-principal investigator on the Cropsmarts project. The ultimate goal is to help growers understand the effects of different crop ingredients and environmental factors on crop production.”

Haynes explained that mushrooms are environmentally sensitive, requiring some unique and often laborious farming methods compared to more traditional crops such as corn or wheat. Mushrooms are grown indoors in rooms that are environmentally controlled, and mushroom farmers need to capture as much data as they can about the crops to ensure their health. They take daily measurements of things like temperature, humidity, compost temperature, and the presence of pests or disease. Much of this information is currently recorded by hand on paper and therefore difficult to analyze across large numbers of crop cycles.

Haynes’ team aims to give farmers a digital solution to streamline that process. Currently in beta testing, the Cropsmarts mobile application allows on-site farmers to capture and input crop data. That data is then uploaded to a web-based dashboard application visible to farm managers. Managers also receive alerts when crop measurements, such as room temperature, fall outside predefined ranges.

“It gives them a much finer-grained analysis of what’s going on,” said Haynes. “Say for example they use compost from supplier A and supplier B, and over time they see that supplier A’s compost is producing more mushroom output, then maybe they’d lean more toward supplier A in the future.”

“The idea is to get a data set of farms and understand how we can improve crop production over time using the information we have,” added Justin Wu, a member of the Cropsmarts team who earned his bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity analytics and operations from IST in December 2020 and his master’s degree in informatics in May.

‘No substitute for the experience’

Wu served as one of the recent developers on the project, applying visualization technologies to improve the web and mobile apps and connecting Bluetooth technology to enable communication between the apps and IoT devices. Most recently, Wu led the design of prototype remote sensing tools that could contribute to mushroom growing operations—including a commercial digital meat thermometer that he converted to an IoT device to be able to measure the temperature of mushroom soil and transmit the data to the app. He also integrated a Raspberry Pi — an inexpensive palm-sized computer — with off-the-shelf sensors to create a system that constantly logs environmental information, such as temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide, to send to the Cropsmarts mobile and web apps.

"We’re working to be able to use the IoT devices to take measurements for environmental control to provide data we can put into visualizations, and eventually use them to generate insights with technologies that we can use to improve crops,” said Wu.

Elissa McNeil, a senior studying human-centered design and development (HCDD), has been tasked with identifying issues, inconsistencies or ideas for improvement within Cropsmarts’ web and mobile applications, as well as updating help documentation for users.

“HCDD has enabled me to be a team member that has a specialization in designing for a user base,” said McNeil. “Many of the students on the research team had some knowledge in designing for users; however, my major explicitly focused on it. Knowing that Cropsmarts has a user base that includes individuals who may have less knowledge about using technology, it was extremely important to consider how we can make their experience with the app as enjoyable and easy as possible.”

For McNeil and other HCDD students to achieve this goal, they are taught to first fully understand the subject matter and the problems that those users are trying to solve.

“Many parts of Cropsmarts are extremely specific to mushroom growing — a very unique form of agriculture,” said McNeil. “In order to begin testing every component of the web and mobile apps, I had to learn about the specific components of mushroom agriculture and how they relate to the application.”

Wu, who will begin his professional career as a programmer at the MITRE Corp., said that the project similarly helped him to prepare for his future career.

“My undergraduate major was in cybersecurity, so I focused a lot of my Cropsmarts design decisions based on how what we were doing would have an effect on the security of the environment we were developing on,” he said. “MITRE is involved with a lot of cybersecurity initiatives, and I know the skills that I’m learning directly from these machines will contribute a lot to what I'm going to do as a developer.”

For Haynes, having student support on the project has not only helped him to advance ideas on improving mushroom agriculture through technology, but also to observe the effectiveness of the skills and experience gained from their degree programs in real-world contexts.

“There’s no substitute for the experience; what we as faculty at IST hope to impart on students is the ability to learn,” Haynes said. “The technology tools I teach today may not be relevant tomorrow, so what I hope to impart on students is the exposure to skills, tools and concepts that give them the ability to quickly adopt new tools, technologies and concepts.”