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As Earth's population grows toward a projected 9 billion by 2050 and climate change puts growing pressure on the world's agriculture, researchers are turning to technology to help safeguard the global food supply.
A research team, led by Kaiyu Guan, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy, & Environmental Sciences, has developed a method to estimate crop yields using satellites that can measure solar-induced fluorescence, a light emitted by growing plants. The team published its results in the journal Global Change Biology.
Scientists have used satellites to collect agricultural data since 1972, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) pioneered the practice of using the color – or "greenness" – of reflected sunlight to map plant cover over the entire globe.
"This was an amazing breakthrough that fundamentally changed the way we view our planet," said Joe Berry, professor of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a co-author of the study. "However, these vegetation maps are not ideal predictors of crop productivity. What we need to know is growth rate rather than greenness."
The growth rate can tell researchers what size yield to expect from crops by the end of the growing season. The higher the growth rate of a soybean plant or stalk of corn, for instance, the greater the harvest from a mature plant.
Or the technology can be used to track marijuana, coca, and poppy fields.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:31AM
Farmers have been doing this by eyeball for a couple hundred years or more. "Knee high by the 4th of July" was just one of the rules of thumb farmers have been using forever.
This tech seems to allow governments to estimate yield over large areas, but I fail to see how it helps to "safeguard the global food supply". It certainly doesn't help the local farmers, In fact the data will probably never filter down to them.
By the time the satellites detect poor crop growth, its probably too late for the farmer to do much about it. It seems to be a tool more suited for estimating (or manipulating) future prices than for managing or protecting crops.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:37PM
It has been a HUGE boon to farmers and farming, not to mention the fact that farming and the government have had a symbiotic relationship ever since there has been farming and government. What we're talking about currently is the data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instruments that are flown on NOAA satellites. They produce products such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from which a lot of useful information [usda.gov] is gleaned. Farmer's observations in the field are great to tell you how things are doing right now, or give you accurate information on crop yields after the fact, but they are not good at forecasting, easily comparison to earlier years, they aren't good for looking at regions larger than the farmer's fields, they aren't good at early detection of crop stress, etc. There's a shit ton of useful information [usda.gov] that comes out of this, all of which are directly advantageous to the farmer. The AVHRR is probably the second biggest use after weather observations for these satellites and is a major science driver on these missions [usda.gov].
NVDI products are so useful, in fact, that commercial satellites such as WorldView make sure to include the proper bandpass filters on them and to calibrate their products appropriately so that they can provide this data. As the number of wavelength bands increase in future imagers, better use of the data will be made by exploiting these new bands, which is what this article is about. However, I don't know if I would be so liberal with words like "revolutionary" and "breakthrough" that the press release uses.
Yes, well this is the customary stupid and ignorant comment he likes to append to his submissions that, just like this one, is contradicted by the content in the article he provides. For a guy that digs up interesting things to submit, it is a shame he feels the need to stick on these inane and flippant comments; trying to go for the "cool" or "ironic" nihilistic vibe, I suppose (dollars to donuts his last name is Malaprop).
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:37PM
All true, but again, your own links prove my point, that the claim of researchers are turning to technology to help safeguard the global food supply isn't exactly true with regard to the satellite imaging. Further, these don't help the farmers, they simply help government.
Go read them again, there is nothing there that percolates down to the farmer level. The best that can be said about them was this line from your first link:
Policy makers, such as the Secretary of Agriculture and USDA Chief Economist, have appreciated obtaining these image views when the situation was appropriate.
By the time data from the satellites becomes available, the farmer has already spent the money for fuel, tilling, seed, and planting. Only to find out mid-summer that the crop will fail due to lack of rain.
There might be some price prediction capability built into satellite data. Perhaps most of the soybean crops are failing like his. But by that time the farmer already knows his crop is behind schedule, and the dearth of rainfall is the problem. If he has irrigation, he can deploy it. But he can simply look at the futures market price of soybeans to determine if that would be cost effective.
So again, my major point was not that NO INFORMATION would be gleaned by these new satellite measurements, but simply that the information isn't useful in the fields.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.