This website uses cookies. To learn more about them,
click here.
Digital technologies are quickly introduced into different sectors of agriculture. To increase profitability, it is extremely important for agribusiness to make the most of innovative technologies. Those companies that will actively use digital solutions in the near future will undoubtedly become industry leaders. At the same time, market players themselves consider human resources and training competent personnel to be the main driver for digitalization of the agri-industrial complex, and the absence of this personnel is called the main barrier to digitalization.
Being supported by the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, Omsk SAU established the Digital Situation Room in 2020. This is the educational and scientific innovational platform for working with real case studies, as well as obtaining competencies on working with big data, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence. Our partners are the Russian Agricultural Bank, the Center of the National Technological Initiative "New Production Technologies" based on the Institute of Advanced Production Technologies of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, the Center for Big Data Storage and Analysis Technologies based on Lomonosov Moscow State University.
As part of the 22nd Russian agri-industrial exhibition "Golden Autumn – 2020", which is the main business event of the Russian agri-industrial complex, Rector of Omsk SAU Oksana Shumakova presented the Digital Situation Room. The official delegation consisted of Prime Minister of the Russian Federation M. V. Mishustin, Deputy Prime Minister Abramchenko, Minister of agriculture of the Russian Federation D. N. Patrushev, and Deputy Minister of agriculture of the Russian Federation M. I. Uvaydov. They were presented projects implemented on the basis of the Digital SItuation Room, in particular, the Digital Double of the farm project.
The Digital Situation Room of the University is an organizational and technical system for supporting decision-making in educational and scientific processes, based on technologies for modeling and analyzing situations. It is also a complex of specially organized workplaces for individual and collective work of students and research and teaching staff of the University on managing, controling and monitoring various objects and situations in order to develop students ' competencies and support production in terms of digitalization.
The Digital Situation Room is equipped with a channel for access to the global network at a speed of at least 1 Gbit / s. for data transmission, a system for visualizing information from several combined video panels, a system for providing video conferencing, a center that provides data storage and backup, and a software package for information and analytical systems. A mini-data center with storage capacity of over 50 terabytes and computing capacity of over 50 teraflops is the core of digital University development. Operators remotely connect to enterprise information systems and equipment. Using specialized programs, they perform remote management and monitoring, and a digital copy of the physical object is created, and data is accumulated for subsequent analysis.
A serious stepping stone for creating a multifunctional center at the University was the work aimed at digitization of agricultural land in the Omsk Region, conducted by Omsk SAU scientists. All the research results have been transformed into pilot projects in the region's agricultural enterprises. Omsk SAU inique solutions, developed with support of Sovzond, SCANEX, and OneSoil companies, have entered the very technological core of the Omsk Region digital agribusiness platform, which is operated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the region.
The Digital Situation Room is truly an icebreaker for the digital transformation of University. A number of strategic projects are implemented here today.
One of them is "Agroscouting". It is aimed at supporting the implementation of digital solutions at agricultural enterprises, and it is implemented by a "Digital Volunteer Group" – University students with relevant competencies. In 2020, supported by the distributor, digital volunteers integrated the "DataFlow" milking parlor management program and the "UNIFORM – AGRI" herd management program. Handwritten data is transformed into a software product and presented on a single digital platform of the enterprise.
One of the most interesting and promising projects is the "Digital Double of the farm" project – a virtual copy of a real production herd of five hundred animals. The data from animals is received from sensors attached to their bodies, and the update interval is twenty minutes. A set of special software products allows calculating more than a hundred parameters for each animal, and then build predictive models based on them and make the right decisions with the right animals.
In terms of organizing the educational process, the digital double is a practice-oriented technology of learning through action. During the academic year, students work with virtual copies of animals, applying their knowledge in different disciplines. By modeling diets and maintenance parameters in a digital double, our students see the effeciency of applying their knowledge in conditions that are very close to real ones, and they gain skills of working with expert diagnostic programs. The created cases succeeded reduced the cost of feeding by 5%, increased productivity by 7%, reduced the cost of veterinary care by 15%, and improved the safety of the herd. Digital double technology allows solving an important task that agricultural education faces nowadays. It allows forming digital competencies in the field of deep data analysis and process management.
It should be noted that Omsk SAU has a world-class scientific potential in the field of selective breeding and genetics of field crops. In 2020, for the first time in Russia, the purple-grain wheat variety "Siren" was transferred to the state testing. The variety of perennial wheat "Sova" is included in the state register.
On the basis of the Digital Situation Room, it is planned to widely introduce innovative methods of accelerated crop selective breeding, including gene mapping, digital and mathematical modeling of genetic sequences, and other bioinformatics methods and techniques. This will allow improving the breeding process and reducing the time for creating new varieties with the specified properties and introducing them to the market by two or three years. In order to implement this, a consortium consisting of Omsk SAU, the world-class Kurchatov Genome Center, and scientific and educational organizations of the international network KASIB and CIMMYT was created.
According to the results of a comprehensive assessment conducted by the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, Omsk State Agrarian University is one of the top 10 leading agricultural Universities that implement educational programs and conduct research for the technological renovation of the agricultural sector of Russian economy.
