Don’t look up!

In the 2001 movie, Behind Enemy Lines, the CIA is seen watching a pilot running through the woods with the bad guys close behind.  In a very secure media room at Langley VA, these infrared images become real-time silhouettes of approximately 30 people moving through the woods – one trying to escape and 29 in pursuit.  I won’t spoil the movie for you, but would Gene Hackman let one of his charges remain in peril? I think not!

Are we far away from a joystick controlled monitor that would let us move the satellite camera to read a license plate? Not according to Hollywood who represents that there are geostationary satellites with technology that would allow us to recognize people from an altitude of 35,800km. I hate to burst their bubble but if anyone focused on me from that altitude, the glare would most likely burn out the lens.

While this makes for good movies and is wonderful food for our imagination, it isn’t real world stuff – or is it?  Most of us have been out to www.terraserver.com to see what our neighborhood looks like from outer space, but few have ventured into the incredibly high definition images that are becoming available.  The resolution of a satellite image is usually expressed in meters – which is the size each pixel represents.  So if your screen was 600 pixels high, your screen would fill with an image 12 miles wide.  If the image was captured at the rate of .6 meters then the resolution on your screen would be .2 miles.  I have seen some images that are 2 feet and even some 1 foot images are popping up – see www.keyhole.com for an example of these.

Nicholas Short, in his Remote Sensing Tutorial, has many observations that help us understand the applications for agriculture.  If you cut through all of the science and technology behind his observations, you have an infrared image that can describe the plant, the moisture in the air and in the soil and the soil type.

To identify the crop, a profile is built using the size and shape of the crop along with its maturity.  Other factors include the size of the leaf, the plant height and the shadow it casts.   We can even tell what stage the crop is in tassleing corn, kernel-bearing wheat and cotton bloom.  If this is of interest to you, there is a wonderful CD-ROM available for $18 at http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/cdorder.htm.

This is all great stuff, but how can this help us going forward.  There are a number of people working on using this imagery to help us at the front end of the cycle.  One of these is my good friend Ron Olson at Cargill (now Mosaic).  Ron is working with a group of people on a project they call VRN (variable rate nitrogen).  This technology will prescribe nitrogen rates based upon a fields yield potential – as identified from satellite imagery and some historical ground information.

It’s only logical that this kind of technology will grow into what crop to grow, what hybrid to use, what technologies to use along with the nutrients required.  It will be fun to watch the next generation where the satellite becomes more than just the observer and becomes part of the process – can we deliver crop dust over a laser from 22,000 miles? Don’t look up – it just might be happening.