ASAP: Applying Science to Agricultural Policy
Accelerating research, innovation, and policy design for a resilient food system.
ASAP-Innovation applies cutting-edge digital replication, modeling, and supercomputing to overcome the temporal limitations in agricultural research and policy design, delivering real-time, science-based solutions for farmers, policymakers, researchers, and the next generation of leaders.
Our Vision: To revolutionize how science informs agricultural policy, making our food systems resilient and sustainable in the face of climate change. ASAP applies science to replicate farming in the digital space, while producing results that can inform decision making in real time and as the situation demands. Members of Congress can access scientifically sound results of a new policy alternative, while farmers can see what that change might mean to their operation.
The Challenge
How to better inform policy about the impacts of alternative & innovative designs?
Time is a major limiting factor for innovation and change: Farmers are constrained by annual crop production cycles, which allows little room for experimentation, while researchers need several years to investigate the impacts of changes in agricultural practices. Evaluating the effectiveness of policies is similarly slow, and the five-year Farm Bill lags behind the pace of emerging technologies and new scientific insights.
Our Approach
- Apply digital replicas of farm systems to simulate weather and socioeconomic scenarios.
- Leverage supercomputing to test policy alternatives in real-time.
- Educate future leaders to translate science into policy.
Updates
ASAP-Innovation leaders host workshop at 2025 Sustainability Research + Innovation (SRI) conference
New book chapter on science applications for agricultural policy published
Leadership
Jonathan Coppess
Associate Professor, Gardner Agriculture Policy Program Director