The Heart of the N.C. PSI: Jevon Smith

Editor’s Note: As we gear up for NC State’s 2025 Day of Giving on March 26, the N.C. PSI is highlighting passion-inspired, donor-fueled staff, students and others behind our plant sciences research, extension and workforce development efforts.

You rarely see Jevon Smith in his office on the Plant Sciences Building’s first floor office. But he’s not slouching.

Defying the stereotype of the computer geek who works alone all day, Smith is always on the move, wherever NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative have needs for advanced information technology.

As CALS Information Technology’s research computing manager, he helps plan, build and maintain technology solutions that serve CALS and N.C. PSI researchers throughout the state.

On days he’s in the Plant Sciences Building, you might find him meeting there or elsewhere on campus consulting with researchers who are planning new interdisciplinary experiments requiring computing power and equipment.

Other times, he might be out in a farmer’s field or a researcher’s plot at one of the state’s 18 research stations to help develop Internet-of-Things devices that capture and relay data on everything from soil moisture to crop biomass and from cows’ behavior to health analysis.

Computers are quite literally improving farming as we’ve known it for thousands of years.

Smith’s been with CALS IT since 2015 and with N.C. PSI since before the Plant Sciences Building opened in 2022. Word has spread throughout campus and beyond on what he’s accomplished, and IT pros from other universities and private industry regularly call on him for presentations, tours and advice. Some of their companies end up being donors.

“Working with NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, SAS and Lenovo has been great, because they are so mesmerized by the stuff we’re doing in agriculture,” Smith says. “They can’t get enough of it. And working with them, I get the sense that we’re in an era when we are going to have an explosion of new technology.”

Smith calls himself “an ambitious, pie-in-the-sky, futuristic person by nature.”

“Right now, I’m thinking about the next five years, because the world is going to look different. Agriculture is going to be different,” he says. “As we move into the future, it’s going to be even more critical that we start to do this merger of technology and agriculture. The potential of what’s possible with technology is going to be radical.”

Recently, Jevon sat down, and slowed down, for a bit to tell us more about his job, what it means to be part of the N.C. PSI community and what’s ahead.

Describe your role and the kind of problems you solve.

I see my role with the N.C. PSI as accelerating research and getting solutions to the people we serve faster. For the researchers, faculty, staff — all the different groups in the building and beyond — I’m the interface between the actual core science and the technology. My goal is to remove roadblocks, enable innovation and success, and hopefully accelerate what they’re doing with advancements in the computer world, including artificial intelligence and new learning models.

While about 70% of my work is specifically PSI-focused, I have a stake in anything that’s researched in CALS, whether that’s on campus or at its research stations and field labs. The thing about PSI is it’s not just the Plant Sciences Building, it’s everywhere you go, whether that’s the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research and Extension Center in Mills River or the blueberry research that’s happening at the Horticultural Crops Research Station in Castle Hayne.

What does being part of the N.C. PSI community mean to you?

It’s  the most exciting part of my NC State career. I already had a great relationship with most of the PSI platform directors and faculty members before the Plant Sciences Building opened. Now, we all come together, kind of like the Avengers, look at each other and say, ‘Wow, we have really come a long way.’

From an IT standpoint, PSI is stressing the system — the status quo, the operational systems, the policies around how NC State works — but in a positive way. It is really forcing the leadership in IT to think differently about how we do things. The PSI is almost like a proof of concept where we can take what we learn and apply it to other things, like the Food Animal Initiative and other initiatives.

Aside from that, I love working with people, united in a cause and solving problems. We all think differently. We all have expertise in different areas. That means the world to me. Here you get to solve problems that really are going to set the future stage for the world when it comes to food security and sustainability.

What is a milestone you are most proud of since beginning your role with PSI?

The first N.C. PSI Backroads Tour in 2022: The tour took us out to the fields of North Carolina to hear from growers and commodity board leaders about the grand challenges they face in agriculture. Being on the Back Roads tour was cool because the people part of my job is expanding to include not only NC State people but the entire community of plant sciences. 

Seeing farmers, being on the farm and talking to farmers about how the change in size of tractors affects their day-to-day farming operations and how we can help with augmenting technology to help them get better yields with less inputs — that was powerful and gave me new perspectives on the actual application of what we’re doing in research and extension.

How does what you do ultimately impact people and agriculture in North Carolina?

My work is impacting both people and agriculture in North Carolina through the improvement of decision making tools. Farmers have made decisions regarding weather, environmental pressures, planting and harvesting for ages. The combination of sensors, artificial intelligence platforms, computer vision systems and data analytics will greatly enhance the accuracy, speed and precision of these decisions. 

Blueberries, for instance, are extremely sensitive to freeze events during flowering. Farmers are burdened by keeping a watchful eye on weather conditions to decide whether or not they need to enact freeze protection measures. It’s often both labor and time intensive. Using live environmental monitoring data ingested into AI models along with automated irrigation, we are ideating pipelines to predict rather than react to these dynamics. One or two these can be the difference between favorable vs. unfavorable agronomic outcomes. Computers are quite literally improving farming as we’ve known it for thousands of years.

What’s coming up at work that you’re most excited about?

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, CALS IT and NC State Extension are working together to build something called a Data Center in a Box. It is essentially a mobile containerized computing and storage environment that can bring more accelerated computational needs for edge computing to farms and research stations or anywhere across the state. We can also use it for training or for operations for disaster recovery. This will allow us to be nimble, flexible, dynamic enough to move the compute environment anywhere across the state.

We could also use it for training and workforce development. I see taking it to a school to show kids what agriculture means. Most have no clue; they think of agriculture as a shovel and dirt. They don’t see the drones and all the technological advancements, the machine learning systems, and the amount of GPUs. This could get them excited about both agriculture and technology.