About

Prasanta K. Kalita is associated with the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois. The center focuses on research and development in digital and precision agriculture, including AI-driven tools, decision-support systems, and data analysis to enhance agricultural productivity and sustainability. The center's initiatives include building trust in AI agronomy through transparent benchmarking, developing interactive AI advisory services like CropWizard, and exploring the use of generative AI for agricultural decision-making. The center also offers educational programs such as a Master’s Degree in Engineering with a concentration in Digital Agriculture, and collaborates internationally through joint seminar series on global perspectives in digital and smart agriculture. The center's work aims to support researchers, educators, farmers, and industry stakeholders in adopting innovative technologies to meet the challenges of feeding a growing global population.

Research topics

• Biology
• Agronomy
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Soil science
• Medicine
• Geology
• Water resource management
• Mathematics
• Agricultural engineering
• Agricultural science
• Toxicology
• Engineering
• Biotechnology

Selected publications

• Assessing the Impacts of Mulching on Vegetable Production Under Drip Irrigation in Burkina Faso

  Sustainability · 2025-01-23 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Burkina Faso faces chronic food insecurity because of adverse agroclimatic conditions and significant soil degradation. Mulching, the practice of applying organic or synthetic materials to the soil surface, offers a promising avenue for enhancing agricultural production in this challenging agroecological setting. This study utilized the Sustainable Intensification Assessment Framework (SIAF) to evaluate the ecological, economic, and social impacts of mulching on vegetable production in Burkina Faso. Experimental and survey data collected from Sonsongona village in Bobo-Dioulasso were used to compare the production of mulched and non-mulched vegetables (tomato, cabbage, and onion) across the five SIAF domains. A calibrated AquaCrop crop model was also applied with 30-year historical weather data to simulate mulched and non-mulched cabbages for the study site. Our results reveal that mulching conserves soil moisture, suppresses weed growth, and enhances soil fertility, contributing to enhanced vegetable production and long-term sustainability. Economically, adopting mulching positively influences vegetable yields, reduces labor requirements, and increases income for smallholder farmers. These mulching benefits lead to community empowerment, particularly among women farmers. Our findings highlight the multifaceted benefits of mulching, suggesting that it holds promise for increasing agricultural productivity and improving economic stability, ecological sustainability, and social well-being in Burkina Faso. These insights contribute to developing context-specific strategies for sustainable intensification, with applicability across similar agroecological contexts in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Recovery of Nutrients from the Aqueous Phase of Hydrothermal Liquefaction—A Review

  Water · 2025-07-14 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is a thermochemical conversion process that converts wet biomass into biocrude oil, a gas phase, a solid phase, and an aqueous phase (HTL-AP). An obstacle to the development and scaling of HTL is the volume of HTL-AP produced during the process, which has high concentrations of nitrogen and carbon and cannot be disposed of in the environment without treatment. The HTL-AP is enriched with organic compounds, particularly light polar organics and nitrogenous compounds, which are inhibitory to microbial treatment in wastewater treatment plants. For this reason, the valorization of the HTL-AP is significant for the circular economy of HTL. This review synthesizes published findings on different types of treatment of the HTL-AP for the recovery of valuable nutrients and the removal of toxic compounds. This work outlines the trade-offs of the treatments to serve as a guide for future research to address these weaknesses and improve the valorization of the HTL-AP. Furthermore, this work uniquely focuses on HTL-AP treatment for recovering plant-available nitrogen, targeting its potential use as a fertilizer. The literature highlights the importance of increasing nitrogen bioavailability in HTL-AP through two-step treatments and by selecting HTL-AP derived from protein-rich feedstocks, which offer higher initial nitrogen content. According to the current state of research, further work is needed to optimize chemical and biological treatments for nutrient recovery from HTL-AP, particularly regarding treatment scale and duration. Additionally, economic analyses across different treatment types are currently lacking, but are essential to evaluate their feasibility and practicality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Capillary Soil Nutrient Profiling Device: Pre-Processing Free Approach for Rapid Soil Nutrient Assessment

  IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience · 2025-09-16

  article

  The development of reliable point-of-source devices for soil nutrient profiling holds the key to unlocking maximum agricultural output while promoting sustainable practices with minimal environmental impact. The dynamic nature of the soil, its testing protocols, and multistep pre-processing of samples results in time-dependent responses from the sensors increasing the testing time and cost requires additional peripheral equipment. Thus, portability along with precision gets affected simultaneously. Moreover, signal processing, data generation, and acquisition also compromise the soil nutrient assessment. In this work, a standalone device was developed with an alternate soil nutrient quantification protocol for nitrate and potassium, leveraging the capillary forces in the cellulose substrate owed to porous architecture and inter-cellulose fiber voids to eliminate conventional protocols like extraction, centrifugation, and filtration (to eliminate matrix effects) to achieve single-step soil nutrient quantification. Additionally, the use of external 24-bit analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), a quick 2-point calibration smartphone was employed to increase the resolution of the measurements and accuracy of the nutrient measurements. Compared to traditional soil testing methods, the proposed system demonstrated a detection limit and quantization limit of 0.1 mM, with a linear response range of 0.5-21 mM for potassium and 0.2-1.4 mM for nitrate. Precision tests across 15 reuse cycles showed average variability below ±5%, confirming the reliability and repeatability of the sensor. The proposed approach can have broader implications such as the development of portable, low-cost, processing-free, and reliable soil nutrient sensors for in-field applications.

  PublisherDOI

• Portable sensors in precision agriculture: Assessing advances and challenges in soil nutrient determination

  TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry · 2024-09-21 · 43 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Analyzing land use land cover dynamics under rapid urbanization using multi-temporal satellite imageries and geospatial technology for Jamshedpur city in India

  Advances in Space Research · 2024-11-27 · 8 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Assessment of Different Frameworks for Addressing Climate Change Impact on Crop Production and Water Requirement

  Water · 2024-07-14

  articleOpen access

  Various methodologies are used to estimate the impact of changing climatic factors, such as precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation, on crop production and water demand. In this study, the changes in rice yield, water demand, and crop phenology were estimated with varying CO2 concentration and an ensemble of general circulation models (GCMs), using a decision support system for agrotechnology transfer (DSSAT), a crop growth model. The measured CO2 concentration of 400 ppm from the Keeling curve, was used as the default CO2 concentration to estimate yield, water demand, and phenology. These outputs, obtained with the default concentration, were compared with the results from climate change scenarios’ concentrations. Further, the outputs corresponding to the ensembled GCMs’ climate data were obtained, and the results were compared with the ensembled crop model outputs simulated with each GCM. The yield was found to increase with the increase in CO2 concentration up to a certain threshold, whereas water demand and phenology were observed to decrease with the increase in CO2 concentration. The two approaches of the ensemble technique to obtain final outputs from DSSAT results did not show a large difference in the predictions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sustainability of cover cropping practice with changing climate in Illinois

  Journal of Environmental Management · 2023-04-17 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Agripreneurial Models for Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization in Bangladesh

  2023-01-01

  articleSenior author

  <b><sc>Abstract.</sc></b> Overwhelming majority of farm households in Bangladesh are smallholder. Purchasing all the agricultural machines for farm activities is beyond the reach and not rationale for them. Even, a smallholder farmer cannot utilize the full capacity of a small-sized machine. Micro agripreneurs (single) with one or two machines also cannot maintain their livelihoods on custom hiring business because of seasonal use of machines. Agripreneurs having machines for all farm activities under a single shed would provide all the necessary services to farmers on custom-hire basis and on the other hand able to maintain their livelihoods round the year. Organized farmers‘ group may also acquire agricultural machines and ensure farming services to her members. However, these agripreneurs (youth and adult farmers) are lacking knowledge and skill on operation and maintenance and custom hiring business of agricultural machinery. To address these issues, a study was conducted to compare the performance of single, single shed and farmers‘ group agripreneurship models for custom hire service provisions of agricultural machines. All three models are found beneficial for the agricultural machinery service receiving farmers. However, from the point of business model, single shed service point (S3P) is found more sustainable in terms of benefits and maintaining livelihoods of the agripreneurs round the year and ensure services to the farmers. Beyond service provisions to the farmers, the S3P is also acting as the center of awareness, knowledge, capacity building and networking for the potential agripreneurs, youth and adult, farmers, students, academicians, researchers, extension officers and policy makers. S3Ps are also promoting the operation and maintenance of agricultural machines, custom hiring business strategies, day to day accounting, business scheduling and sustainability of the business. Farmers‘ group agripreneurship is also found beneficial in terms of financial resource mobilization for having the machines and providing services to group members; however, management of operation and services are found lacking in motivation as the operator of the machines does not personally own them. Since, farmers are getting agricultural machinery services from the S3Ps hence they are adopting synchronize cultivation practice of crops- a key concern for sustainable agricultural mechanization for a country having fragmented land like Bangladesh. Considering the above mentioned situational analysis, it is imperative that the single shed service point (S3P) service model would have played an important role for strengthening agricultural mechanization in Bangladesh.

  PublisherDOI

• Evaluation of long-term impact of cereal rye as a winter cover crop in Illinois

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2023-03-20 · 7 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Present Status of Appropriate Scale Mechanization in Selected Villages of Southern Delta of Bangladesh

  2021 ASABE Annual International Virtual Meeting, July 12-16, 2021 · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  <b>Abstract.</b> The Southern Delta of Bangladesh is characterized by area of adverse climatic conditions like cyclone, salinity and water scares in dry season. USAID funded and ASMC supported project Appropriate Scale Mechanization Innovation Hub (ASMIH)-Bangladesh is adopting a system approach for developing appropriate scale mechanization to advance sustainable intensification for smallholder farming systems in Bangladesh since 2016. The intervention areas were Dumuria, Khulna; Wazirpur, Barishal; Kalapara, Putuakhali and Shubarnachar, Noakhali districts. The overall objective of this study was to assess the present status of mechanization of crop production activities. The methodology was included discussion with researchers, field visit, FGD and household survey. Mechanization, adoption of mechanized technology, participation of male and female farmers and service provisions were also evaluated. The study findings showed that alongside of male farmers of the households, female farmers are coming forward in field crop production activities especially in rice seedling raising, transplanting and harvesting. The male household members dominated in using agriculture machines in field crop production activities and the female farmers dominated in post-harvest activities of crops like drying and winnowing. About 26% respondent households‘ were found using owned mechanized equipment, 72% respondent households using farm machineries through hiring customized rental services, and only 2% using shared machines owned by farmers‘ group. Key issues to be addressed are changes in mindset among farmers for adopting appropriate machines and technologies, conduct adaptive research and demonstration efforts, institutional support, networks of local service providers, farmer groups and scientists, and ensuring availability and access to machinery.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Terence Épule Épule

  Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue

  30 shared

• O. Samaké

  McGill University

  25 shared

• Lahcen Achli

  Instituto Politécnico Nacional

  25 shared

• Ayoub Dhiba

  UniLaSalle

  25 shared

• Fassé Traoré

  Instituto Politécnico Nacional

  25 shared

• Wenxi Zhang

  25 shared

• Hafiz Rehim

  Instituto Politécnico Nacional

  25 shared

• Xubing Monirifar

  Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue

  25 shared

Labs

• Center for Digital AgriculturePI