Iowa State University’s gotten a gift from food-processing giant Cargill that’s valued at sixteen million dollars in the form of two software programs. Barb Booce with the ISU Foundation says one is an agricultural program that will crunch great amounts of data.She says the crop forecasting system will make ISU the only school in the world with that kind of capacity for projecting and analyzing crop yields. The other is an engineering program, known as the Manufacturing Execution System, that’ll let students analyze the whole manufacturing process, from the shop floor to the executive office. She says it can analyze areas as small as part of a cornfield, for example, and tell the owner how much fertilizer to use based on the properties and history of that parcel of land. Booce explains the generous gift is the culmination of a long partnership. She says Cargill has a 40-year relationship with ISU, and has hired more ISU grads than graduates from any other university.
