Fighting Climate Change One Harvest at a Time

Via Satellite archive photo via Shutterstock

Data-driven decision-making has come to the agricultural industry, and satellite technology is driving its adoption, offering valuable insights into crop health, soil conditions and resource management. According to the Global Ag Tech Initiative, satellite Earth Observation revenues will grow at a more than 19% CAGR from 2024 to 2030.

That’s good news for those who eat – which at last count, included all of humanity. For us, food is life. In all its aromas and flavors, it fuels our bodies and satisfies our cravings.

But like all good things, food comes at a price – and not just what you pay at the grocery store. Agriculture currently produces one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, more than the transportation or heavy industry that are the usual villains. In addition to emissions, farms’ fertilizer and animal waste wash into rivers, lakes and oceans, where they contribute to algal blooms, dead zones in the water and higher GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Add it all up, and we clearly need more sustainable ways to grow the food that gives us life.

The 50-Billion-Euro Question

That’s what the European Union decided to do through changes to its Common Agricultural Policy or CAP. The EU’s single biggest expenditure, the CAP distributes more than 50 billion euros each year to support farmers and keep food affordable. The EU added a new goal in 2019: to make European agriculture climate-neutral by 2035. That would mean replacing traditional practices with sustainable ones across hundreds of millions of hectares of farmland.

At first glance, the scale of the challenge makes it seem impossible. The EU found a clever strategy. Under the CAP, each member state is already responsible for regulating its own farms – and the EU launched a shared service to supply them with the information needed to implement the new climate-neutral goal. Using public satellite data from Europe’s Sentinel-2 mission, countries capture visible changes in their farmers’ fields, from planting to harvesting. Using this data, they encourage farmers to adopt new sustainable practices, with CAP funding as the incentive.

Data Fusion in Space

Adopting a new way of doing things is never easy. But in some parts of Europe, there was a bigger issue. The nation of Slovenia was a prime example. It has many small farms with complicated layouts, which the government found hard to analyze from the available data. In search of a solution, Slovenia’s government looked across the Atlantic to a U.S. company, Planet, which operates hundreds of EO satellites in low Earth orbit that capture images of Earth’s entire landmass every day.

Slovenia and Planet created a digital platform called Sentinel Hub, which combines the company’s high-frequency private satellite data with the Sentinel public data. This data merger is powered by a service called Planet Fusion. It automatically harmonizes data from different sources to create a more complete record of changes over time – and offers greater detail of European farms at a higher resolution and broader scale than ever before.

Slovenian government workers can now check the data for most farms and make a judgment in under 30 seconds. They need to visit fewer farms to double-check the analysis – and that has slashed more than 1 million euros from annual spending.

When the EU committed to become climate-neutral in farming, it was making a second promise as well. To find a way to measure the actions of millions of farmers across the length and breadth of Europe. The fusion of satellite data lets governments verify what happens on the farm – and offers farmers a reason to adopt new ways to sustainably grow the food that gives us life.

Tamara Bond-Williams is the new executive director of Space & Satellite Professionals International. Robert Bell is outgoing executive director of SSPI. The organization produces the Better Satellite World campaign, which dramatizes the immense contributions of space and satellite to life on Earth.  More at www.bettersateliteworld.com.