Emergent Launches Ag University Research Farm Program with Ohio State as Founding Partner
CFAES Researchers and Students Gain Real-Time Sensor Infrastructure to Advance Precision Agriculture Research at the Molly Caren Agricultural Center
Columbus, OH – Aug. 4, 2026 – The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) has selected Emergent to deploy the Rip Platform at Ohio State’s Molly Caren Agricultural Center, giving CFAES researchers, faculty, and students direct access to RipLINK™ LoRaWAN connectivity, Rip’s Warehouse™ precision agriculture sensors, and Ask Rip™ AI farm intelligence. The deployment is the first under Emergent’s Ag University Research Farm Program, a national initiative to equip land-grant universities and research farms with the connected infrastructure their research missions require.
The deployment equips Molly Caren with continuous, real-time data across soil health, above-canopy environmental conditions, irrigation, and asset tracking — generating ground-truth field data that supports grant research, sustainability metrics, and agronomic model validation. For CFAES, it also means findings are grounded in the same infrastructure running on commercial farms across the country.
For students and researchers at Ohio State, the Molly Caren Agricultural Center is a working example of what connected farm infrastructure enables — with direct applicability to Ohio farmers and a replicable model for land-grant research farms nationwide.
“The Molly Caren Center serves as a living laboratory — generating insights directly applicable to Ohio farmers and scalable to the national research community and giving researchers and students access to connected, real-time infrastructure,” said Dr. Scott A. Shearer, Professor and Chair, Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering at The Ohio State University.
“For the first time, CFAES researchers and students are working with the same continuous, real-time ground-truth data that’s running on commercial farms across the country,” said Mike Roudi, CEO of Emergent. “That connection between the research environment and the real world is exactly what this program was built to create.”
Emergent plans to expand the Ag University Research Farm Program to additional land-grant institutions across key agricultural regions in 2026, building a national network of connected research farms generating real-time, field-validated data for the benefit of American agriculture.
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About Emergent
Emergent is the data infrastructure layer for American agriculture. The Rip Platform combines RipLINK™ LoRaWAN based connectivity, Rip’s Warehouse™ curated precision agriculture device ecosystem, and Ask Rip™ AI farm intelligence platform to give producers, dealers, and research institutions continuous, real-time sensor data and the automated farm actions that converts data into measurable ROI. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Emergent has active deployments across the United States. Learn more at www.emergentconnext.com.
About The Ohio State University CFAES
The Ohio State University's College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) is one of the nation's leading land-grant colleges, advancing research, education, and outreach across food systems, agriculture, and natural resources. The Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering (FABE), chaired by Dr. Scott A. Shearer, is a national leader in applying engineering principles to agricultural challenges, including precision agriculture, autonomous systems, and data-driven farm management. Learn more at cfaes.osu.edu.
