
Satellites
and Planes Scan Cornfields for CluesBy Don Comis May 2, 2001For the past three years, an airplane has
been flying over a U.S. Department of
Agriculture research center in Beltsville, Md., carrying an
electro-optical scanner that functions like a remote light meter
with a camera-like lens protruding through the planes underside. USDAs Agricultural Research
Service and the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) helped a company in Maryland develop the
scanner system. As part of a cooperative research agreement with
GEOSYS,
Inc., of Plymouth, Minn., ARS is testing to see if the scanners
images can be used to delineate consistent variations--high and low yielding
spots--in farmers' fields to define management zones. The
researchers will identify likely spots by light reflected from the foliage--the
more foliage, the higher the expected yield. The initial tests are being done with cornfields in Maryland and Minnesota.
Project organizers are using the scanner images, converted to computer maps,
as overlays to existing maps, including crop yield maps. Their goal is to tie
the images to a land feature, such as the capacity of soil at a specific
location to hold water, or land slope, that may be causing consistent yield
variations. GEOSYS has expertise in analyzing imagery and handling other types of
spatial (map-like) information for precision farming. As USDAs chief
scientific agency, ARS has expertise in remote sensing, yield prediction, and
precision farming. The CRADA is part of an ARS research project as well as a NASA project that
also involves Cargill Research, a major
agribusiness firm that hopes to use aerial and satellite imagery for precision
farming. If the maps produced by this project were to be commercialized for
precision farming, they would be available for farmers to load into computers
on their tractors. Then as farmers drove the tractors across their fields, the
computers would adjust the amount of fertilizer or the type and amount of seed,
for example, for high- and low-yielding areas. Scientific contact: Charles L. Walthall,
ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing
Laboratory, Beltsville, Md., phone (301) 504-6074, fax (301) 504-8391,
[email protected].
U.S. Department of Agriculture | |