NASA Harvest Updates
November-December 2019 Highlights from NASA Harvest
Harvest leadership and many partners had a significant presence at dozens of sessions, illustrating the critical return of agricultural remote sensing to AGU, which has gained new interest from researchers and actors in a variety of sectors. Harvest itself led a series of sessions on Thursday December 13, titled "Earth Observations for Food Security and Agriculture: Synthesizing Public and Private Sector Knowledge".

In rural Tanzania, local partners WeRobotics, Tanzania Flying Labs and Agrinfo have been gathering field data for the NASA Harvest-led initiative "Pre-Harvest loss for smallholder farmers”.

At the ASA-CSSA 2018 meetings held from Nov 4-7 2018 in Baltimore, Harvest partners presented on the use of earth observations in agriculture applications during a special symposium on “Advances in the Use of Earth Observations for Crop Modeling and Monitoring for Food Security”.

Harvest partner Joe Glauber of IFPRI co-authored a new book,  Agricultural Policy in Disarray . A timely book in light of the new Farm Bill, the authors assert that agricultural policy in the United States is highly chaotic. Persistent lobbying pushes by interest groups result in complex and often internally inconsistent initiatives that make up the complicated mix of federal agricultural programs. 

Stanford partners Dr. David Lobell and George Azzari released a report titled " Satellite mapping of tillage practices in the North Central US region from 2005 to 2016", which uses satellite data to examine how tillage practices have shifted towards environmentally beneficial reduced or no-till methods.

The world’s agricultural monitoring systems provide up-to-date information on food production to decision makers that is crucial to global and national food security. When prices become dangerously volatile—as they did during the food price crisis of 2007-2011—these systems spread critical information quickly that can reduce the risks of market and supply upheavals.