NASA’s Devotion to Agriculture

I’m in Sacramento this week at the Agri-Pulse Food and Ag Issues Summit West, and had the honor of speaking with a NASA earth science division director Karen St. Germain… a leading topic of discussion? The common-sense marriage of the agriculture industry and NASA. St. Germain joins us to explain more…

“We’ve really been looking at how we can our NASA data models and analysis more useful and impactful for decision makers of all sorts. What I mean is everything from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to state level decision makers to private industry to help them understand where they might want to invest and what stressors they may see in the future.”

One new tool farmers can utilize today is OpenET, a free app that provides easily accessible satellite-based estimates of evapotranspiration (ET) for improved water management.

“I think OpenET is the one I’m most excited about because it gives producers a reliable tool to understand how much water was used by their field. And they can then use that information to tune how they manage water and I think putting that kind of information into people’s hands is in a way that’s easy for them to use. It’s just a critical part of what we can do.”

Once again that is Karen St. Germain at the Agri-Pulse Food and Ag Issues Summit West. For more information on OpenET, go to www.openetdata.org.