Aerial view of the Experimental Smart Farm showing research plots and UC Merced campus

The Central Valley's testbed for smart agriculture.

40 acres of instrumented Central Valley cropland — open data, shared infrastructure, and a testbed for the next generation of agricultural research.

Explore the Farm Bring your research
Navigate the Farm

What you can explore.

Everything you need to understand ESF, from infrastructure to data access.

Aerial view of the farm

About the Farm

Our mission, history, and capabilities

Close-up of a cotton boll at ESF

Crop Information

Current crops, varieties, and growing seasons

Mapping drone in flight over the farm

Maps & GIS

Spatial data and farm layout

Weather station collecting environmental data

Data Access

Datasets, formats, and access requests

Researchers collecting soil samples

Research

Conduct research at ESF

Experimental Smart Farm welcome sign

Contact

Get in touch with our team

Advancing Agricultural Research

One of the first new UC Agricultural Experiment Stations in over 50 years.

Funded by AES and the F3 (Farms Food Future) initiative, ESF operates under UC Merced's VISTA program — the Valley Institute for Sustainability, Technology, and Agriculture. The farm is built for field-scale experimentation: real crops, real infrastructure, real data.

Read about VISTA
Beautiful vista of cover crops at ESF with mountains in the distance