This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project addresses the NSF Big Ideas of Understanding the Rules of Life and Harnessing the Data Revolution in targeting the need to provide food, fiber and fuel for a growing population using fewer resources (land, water, pesticides and fertilizers) in uncertain and rapidly changing environments. It is widely recognized that current agricultural technologies, from crop genetic improvement to field crop production, will not meet future agricultural demands, due to their heavy reliance on expensive, time-consuming, trail and error field trials to develop improved plant breeds. Emerging mathematical optimization and machine learning methods for analyzing high-dimensional data provide opportunities to speed up plant breeding to achieve rapid and efficient adaptation of crops to changing environments. The approaches in this project will take advantage of engineering techniques that have been used to remarkably improve the efficiency and resiliency of communication, manufacturing, transportation and energy systems. The research requires the synthesis of multiple disciplines, including agronomy, crop modeling, machine learning, operations research, optimization and plant breeding and aims to demonstrate the leadership role of engineering in addressing agricultural challenges. Three technical issues, which represent a small but hig