Tech-driven rice and bioenergy research expands at Beaumont

June 20, 2025 - by Kay Ledbetter -- A future where the rice crop uses less water and thrives with lower inputs is coming into sharper focus at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Beaumont – thanks in part to new technologies led by longtime researcher Yubin Yang, Ph.D.

While a newly named Texas A&M Department of Soil and Crop Sciences faculty member, Yang isn’t new to the Texas A&M AgriLife rice and energy crop programs at Beaumont at all.

Yang, recently named an assistant professor in integrated cropping systems management, has been tackling crop challenges at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Beaumont since 2001, where he started as a biosystems analyst.

“In my new position, I will have more opportunities to collaborate with researchers in different disciplines to tackle transdisciplinary challenges in agricultural research,” Yang said. “Also, I will be able to train graduate students to help prepare the next generation of agricultural researchers.

“My long-term goal is to transform agriculture research and production into a digital and AI-driven paradigm by applying cutting-edge technologies and developing integrated decision-making tools,” Yang said. “The technologies and tools can help us make critical contributions to maintain the competitive edge of U.S. agriculture, serve our stakeholders, and fulfill the research and outreach missions of Texas A&M AgriLife Research.”

More than 20 years of agricultural innovation

Through his research, Yang has developed extensive climatic, soil and cropland databases for integrated simulation analysis and decision support systems.

His past projects span rice water conservation, rice post-harvest grain management, and integrated rice system modeling under current and future climate conditions.

Additionally, he has been involved in multiple projects on sustainable bioenergy production systems involving energycane and biomass sorghum.

A technology-filled future

Moving forward, Yang said his primary research focuses will be on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAV, to assess major crop traits and monitor crop status on nutrients, water and pest pressures, and on modeling crop genotype and environment interactions, integrating genomics, phenomics, machine learning and crop modeling.

The research will lead to the development of decision-support tools to improve crop management, productivity and sustainability.

Next steps: Toward digital rice selection

Yang now directs a Texas A&M AgriLife Research project to develop a digital rice selection system that integrates UAV imagery and multitrait decision-making to screen for best-performing genotypes.

Through UAV-captured images of rice at key growth stages, the team will develop algorithms to identify the traits of the various rice genotypes. This work supports rice breeding programs. The technologies can be adapted to support both researchers and producers in assessing and monitoring crop status to optimize crop management.

“Ultimately, we hope to overcome a major hurdle in agricultural research – the labor-intensive and time-consuming process of manual field data collection,” he said. “We want to create automated crop trait assessment tools to streamline data collection and analysis with greatly improved efficiency and productivity.”

Yang will join Omar Samonte, Ph.D., AgriLife Research rice breeder and associate professor, Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, to discuss the project at the 77th annual Beaumont Rice Field Day on July 10 at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center.