Associate Professor Wendong Zhang will serve as principal investigator on a research project that recently received a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant. The project “Measuring and Forecasting China’s Agricultural Production, Consumption, Stocks, and Imports by Generating Reliable Data and Utilizing Machine Learning Methods” seeks to use machine learning methods to forecast China’s agricultural imports. The researchers note that there is a lack of reliable statistics on China’s key agricultural commodities, which creates price volatility and might reduce the transparency of US and world agricultural markets.

USDA-NIFA awarded the project a $649,980 grant. Professor Dermot Hayes and Postdoctoral Research Associate Xi He, both of CARD, Associate Professor Guiping Hu of Iowa State’s Department of Industrial Engineering, and Associate Professor Tao Xiong of China’s of Huazhong Agricultural University will serve as co-PIs. The project runs from June of 2022 to May of 2025.