Every meal has a story that begins long before it reaches the plate. No matter what it is, parts of it trace back to the soil—some constituent component was planted, grown, and harvested at a farm. Even the seemingly unnatural qualifies; neon cheese puffs began life as corn, and gummy worms owe their wiggle to a syrup pressed from the same.

Behind every bite is a farmer who spends a season making calculated bets about water, fertilizer, and pests, hoping for a bountiful harvest without ever having a complete picture of what’s happening on each plant or beneath the soil.

“There’s a lot of competition for land that you could farm. You’re not going to get more of it,” says Cherie Kagan, the director of The Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture (IoT4Ag)— a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center led by Penn. “You have to make the most of what you have—not ruin the fields, not waste resources.”

Add mounting threats like aflatoxin, a fungal contaminant locking U.S. peanuts out of foreign markets, and the bacterial greening disease hollowing out Florida citrus, and farming’s oldest problems intensify—by the time a cornfield yellows, the damage is done, and the fall harvest is jeopardized.

IoT4Ag seeks to give farmers a better picture of their harvests before it’s too late.

“We want to make the invisible visible,” says Kagan, who is the Stephen J. Angello Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemistry at Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences. “It’s like preventative medicine.”

Penn leads a team with researchers from Purdue University, the University of Florida, and the University of California, Merced, so the technology can prove itself across different crops, climates, and regulations.

Read more at Penn Today.