Agricultural News
Introducing Sara Howard of the Altus FFA Chapter, Your 2021 Southwest Area Star in Agriscience
Tue, 30 Mar 2021 15:18:30 CDT
During the month of April, the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and Oklahoma Farm Report is spotlighting the twenty Area Stars of Oklahoma FFA that are among the highest achievers in the organization. The stars come from the five areas in four categories- Star in Ag Placement, Star in Agriscience, Star in Agribusiness and Star in Production Agriculture. This week, we spotlight the five area stars in Agribusiness for 2021. One Star Finalist featured in the coming days from each of the categories, will be named the State Star Award Winner during the 95th Oklahoma State FFA Convention coming up April 27, and 28th in Oklahoma City.
This week, our coverage of the 2021 Oklahoma FFA Star Award Finalists kicks off with Agriscience competitor Sara Howard, representing the Southwest Area for Area star in Agriscience from the Altus FFA chapter. Howard has been working with a PIM (raspberry pi imaging camera) to identify weed life in a field to help with chemical spraying, and fertilizer use." Howard said she got inspiration for this project from MIT Articles, and other agriculture experiments, "Those seemed really interesting to me and I wanted to see the results for myself."
Currently Howard is working on how to implement the technology in her family's machinery, and around the state, "The implementation process is slow right now because the software and technology is still being developed. But we use the facial recognition that you have on your phone and we feed it a ton of pictures of plants that we want it to identify. Then we cause it to know what those look like so when we feed it a video, or another picture, it can pick out which plants we want it to know. It can even identify cotton so it doesn't pick that up and cause it to be labeled as a harmful botanical pest." Howard is hopeful that going forward her project can help farmers save a lot of money
Howard has been very active in her FFA Chapter and says the biggest thing she learned from FFA is that mistakes are Ok, "making mistakes is something you learn from, and you move forward, and I feel like that is something a lot of people don't learn until they are older."
Howard will be attending Oklahoma State University in the Fall to pursue a degree in Agriculture Communications and Business.
Click or Tap below to hear KC Sheperd's Complete interview with Atlus FFA's Sara Howard.
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