Real Time Information System to Estimate Processed Grain Value Over the U.S.

The influence of environmental conditions on specific grain quality characteristics such as oil, starch, and protein contents in major grain crops has been known for the last several decades. Within the past several years incentive to predict the value of grains prior to harvest has increased due to significant price differences paid for grains possessing specific quality characteristics. There are currently no tools available to monitor hourly environmental conditions and to model the resulting effects on gain quality. Only with the recent increase in availability of high powered work stations and mass storage devices has it become possible to model crop phenological/physiological development over the continental United States at a resolution high enough to provide grain quality estimates useful for growers, elavators, and processors. It is evident that there is a need to be able to determine grain quality characteristics prior to harvest, so that proper marketing and transportation strategies can be planned for the grain. Quetzal Computational Associates is proposing in this Phase I SBIR effort to develop a computer-based methodology for determining quality characteristics of grains and estimating the processed values of those grains at county and sub-county spatial resolution over the continental United States.