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posted by n1 on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the going-green dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:37PM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:37PM (#262313) Journal

    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.

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