By Ryan Hanrahan
Agri-Pulse’s Kim Chipman, Olivia M. Bridges, and Noah Wicks reported that “Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Jared Isaacman signed an interagency agreement to modernize USDA data, including agricultural statistics, remote sensing science, modeling, geospatial data engineering and super intelligence or machine learning.”
“‘American farmers are the best in the world and deserve any solution we can leverage, even when it is out of this world,’ Rollins said, adding that using NASA’s technology, research and development will fortify U.S. agriculture,” Chipman, Bridges and Wicks reported. “The cooperation aims to align USDA statistical requirements with NASA Earth science missions and data products. USDA and NASA also will undergo discussions related to data access and infrastructure and jointly review algorithms for crop condition indicators, yield models, planted/harvested area estimation and disaster impact assessment.
ExecutiveGov’s Sophia Elliott reported that “planned activities include:
- Mission and data alignment: Regular technical exchanges to match USDA’s statistical needs with NASA Earth science missions and data products, such as satellite observations and model outputs.
- Data access and infrastructure: Discussions on scalable access to NASA archives, cloud-native geospatial formats, application programming interfaces and workflows that support USDA operations.
- Methodology and validation: Joint reviews of algorithms for crop condition indicators, yield models, planted and harvested area estimates, and disaster impact assessments.”
Source : illinois.edu