Working with NASA might seem out of this world, but a new program aims to show the public that NASA is in agriculture on Earth, not just in space.
On April 23, farmers, researchers and other stakeholders met at the University of Illinois for the inaugural NASA Acres Symposium.
“When you think about NASA, you think about launching rockets or launching satellites, but one of the biggest NASA programs is Earth Science,” said Kaiyu Guan, founder of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at U of I.
In March 2023, NASA Acres was established to bridge the gap between space and farms. The program aims to strengthen US agriculture by responding to some of the most pressing challenges facing the industry.
NASA Acres works with agriculturalists throughout the US to see how NASA’s resources can be used to help farmers.
Guan, who is also the chief scientist for NASA Acres, said the satellite Earth Observation based data can be used to track and predict the impacts of weather and climate, pest damage and soil tillage.
NASA satellite data can also be used to monitor nutrient loss and deficiencies and help farmers understand the impacts of practices like planting cover crops.
“We’ve been working extensively on crop nitrogen concentration,” Guan told FarmWeek. “We’ve started to have confidence that we can sense how much nitrogen has been absorbed by crops.”
Guan said that by integrating all available data, farmers can determine optimal management practices for rotation patterns, cover crop adoption and tillage methods. “This can help the whole system reduce nitrogen loss,” he said.
Alyssa Whitcraft, NASA Acres executive director and associate research professor at the University of Maryland, said although NASA has been involved with agriculture since the 1970s, there has been a disconnect between the data and the farmer.
But throughout the past decade, Whitcraft said NASA has focused more on connecting with farmers to find the data that helps them.
Whitcraft said one of the main objectives of the program is to ensure NASA Acres’ data can be integrated into some of the tools farmers already use. More than 30 agriculture and research groups, including Illinois Farm Bureau and U of I, are helping the program achieve this goal.
“Whether farmers use a preferred system for visualization when they’re inside their combine or their sprayer, we would like our data and our tools to enrich that,” Whitcraft said.
The next step is to inform farmers that they can access findings, data and tools and continue to provide their input through NASAacres.org.
“We know that success is predicated on farmer involvement,” Whitcraft said. “Our mission, paid for by public dollars, is to support farmers in having a productive, sustainable and resilient system to support their rural communities for decades and generations to come.”
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association. For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
