A ‘Shark Tank’ for agriculture sparks new ideas here

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In a nutshell

• Turning research into results: The AgTech Innovation Hub supports Ohio State-led projects designed to solve immediate agricultural challenges. Researchers present their ideas to a panel to win funding. 
• Helping fields weather extremes: Hub-funded research by Assistant Professor Vinayak Shedekar helps farmers manage water levels in their fields through automated drainage systems and AI tools. The goal: boosting yields while reducing nutrient runoff.
• Bringing the lab to the farm: Hub funding helps Professor Luis Rodriguez-Saona develop portable technology that allows farmers to detect mycotoxins in grain on-site. The advantage: real-time results instead of mailing a sample to a lab for safety testing.
• Funding the Hub itself: The effort is a partnership among the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, Nationwide Foundation and Ohio Farm Bureau.
  
  This summary was generated by AI and reviewed by an editor.

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It’s no secret that farmers often complain about the weather, that it’s always either too dry or too wet. And you can’t blame them. After all, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service says 41 percent of federal crop insurance payouts cover losses due to drought, and about 27 percent compensate losses caused by soggy soils.

That context underpins the research of Vinayak Shedekar ’16 PhD, whose work focuses on agricultural water management. It also helps explain why the Ohio State assistant professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering has twice won awards in a competitive grant program aimed at developing practical solutions to real-world agricultural challenges.

In 2026, Shedekar was one of five Ohio State researchers to successfully compete for funding from the AgTech Innovation Hub, the collaborative research partnership among Nationwide Foundation, the Ohio Farm Bureau and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES). The partnership, created in 2022 with a $2 million grant by Nationwide, rewards advanced research and technology to address some of agriculture’s biggest challenges, including extreme and unpredictable weather exacerbated by climate change.

Many of the funded Innovation Hub projects help researchers make the final push from theory to practice, driving innovation in agricultural technology to create practical, data-driven solutions for farmers in the field. “Nationwide was founded by farmers, and agriculture is still at the heart of who we are,” says Chad Jester, president of Nationwide Foundation. “We helped launch the AgTech Innovation Hub because farmers are facing real challenges right now, especially around weather, climate risk and long-term resilience, and we believe it’s important to invest in resources that pave the way for a vibrant and robust food supply chain.”

Shedekar’s current work complements a technology funded by the Hub in 2023. In that project, he worked with research partners to automate farm drainage control systems that allow growers to raise and lower water levels in farm soils. In parts of the country—the former swamps of Northwest Ohio are a prime example—dense clay soils are highly productive but not until excess water is drained from them using subsurface drainage pipes. For decades, the drainage infrastructure has drawn water from the land 24-7, which meant, Shedekar explains, “we have too much in spring and too little in July and August.”

“Imagine what would happen if you would be able to provide all of the water that we need,” Shedekar says. That problem was solved (at least in theory) a few decades ago by researchers who developed control structures that allow farmers to drain the water during wet times and hold it in the soil during seasonal droughts. More than 25 years of research at Ohio State has demonstrated that controlled drainage holds the potential to increase corn yields, for example, by as much as 6 percent.

The problem, Shedekar says, is that manual structures require frequent visits to the field and a bit more maintenance, so many of them sit unused at the edge of the fields. He and his partners developed an automated version that can be operated from the grower’s home office using a laptop or phone.

Done. But then Shedekar wondered what if artificial intelligence could be used to process decades of data collected by the USDA and other agencies—information about soil type, crop yields and detailed weather patterns—that could help them anticipate future needs for tweaking the control structures? That’s the basis of his most recent award, an interactive visualization tool that could help increase yields further while, at the same time, reducing the loss of nutrient additives like phosphorus and nitrogen, which often escape through drainage and help feed harmful algae blooms in the Great Lakes and elsewhere.

The AgTech Innovation Hub differs from many grant opportunities in that it focuses not on basic research but on immediate, practical problems that need to be solved, says Gary Pierzynski ’89 PhD, associate dean for research and graduate education at CFAES.

“We wanted a clear statement of a problem that this research is addressing and how their project would either contribute to a solution or be a solution,” Pierzynski says. “And they don’t have much time [to bring their ideas to fruition]. They only have a year.”

Adam Sharp ’94, executive vice president of the Ohio Farm Bureau, says the agricultural community understands the importance of basic research, but adds that farmers are “always looking for things that we can take and put them right to use.”

The Hub’s review process is unusual for the academic world, using a vetting procedure like the television show “Shark Tank.” Applicants have 10 minutes to pitch their project to a panel that includes college leadership, as well as representatives of Nationwide and the Farm Bureau.

Another of this year’s award-winners was a project that was perfectly sized for this face-to-face pitch process, says Luis Rodriguez-Saona. He brought his prototype spectrometer—about the size and shape of a four-slice toaster—to the pitch along with his laptop and the software he developed that allows farmers to test grain samples for health-threatening mycotoxins in the field, instead of sending them to a lab and waiting days for results.

“What we’re trying to address is the need for real time, in-field detection of mycotoxins,” he explains. “With the presentation, we brought the system with us so they could actually see the technology.”

Rodriguez-Saona, professor of food science and technology, acknowledges that the hub’s speedy process is “a little bit overwhelming” but says members of the panel “were amazingly supportive and … asked really good questions.”