NASA Has Agriculture Focused Programs

Bradley Doorn program manager for the agriculture area in the applied research program at NASA says that when NASA began 50 years ago, they started looking at agriculture via satellites. And that has continued on ever since.

“Doing global assessments of agricultural production, global knowledge of weather events and weather extremes and trying to understand our weather better and share that with so save in NOAA National Weather Service. Now today like with everything that we see in this area, that technology exploding capabilities exploding now our data is getting really down to that farm level where we really are starting to have more and more tools that are relevant at our management level and at the level that they have to assess policies.”

Currently, Doorn says they focus on two programs.

“Their networks partnership with the community one is called NASA harvest started that about five years that's more focused on global issues. For instance, one of them is say the Ukraine production food production issues.”

The second program was just recently launched. It's called the acres program and focuses solely on domestic agriculture needs things like new climate, smart ag initiatives, and water management. Doorn says that they work with Extension Service programs and tools to integrate NASA data into what has already been used by farmers such as high-resolution data and GPS