The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is best known for space exploration, but the organization’s data is also publicly used for an array of purposes to support agriculture, including monitoring crop production, field conditions and global food security.
The NASA Acres program was officially launched at Commodity Classic in March 2024 as a multidisciplinary consortium with over 40 partners. Commissioned by NASA and led by the University of Maryland, the program focuses on advancing the use of satellite-based Earth observations for agricultural and food security decision makers.
NASA Acres Executive Director Alyssa Whitcraft, who was trained as a geospatial scientist, describes herself as a "bridge between the science world and the people who need it," farmers, global food security leaders, government, industry leaders and academia.
Alyssa Whitcraft, executive director of NASA AcresWhitcraft spoke to nearly 1,000 women from 47 states and nine countries in Denver at the Women in Agribusiness Summit this fall. We connected with her at the event to learn more about the NASA Acres program and potential future advancements it can make for agriculture production and global food security. Some answers have been edited for brevity.
Q: From a 50-foot view, what is NASA Acres and what is the program’s potential?
A: The Acres program is NASA’s farmer-facing, outward-facing U.S. focused agriculture program. When I say public facing, it really enhances the effort to take the innovation and the data that they have and use it to strengthen American agriculture.
Q: When was satellite technology first used in the U.S.?
A: The earliest models were collected in the 1970s around the time of the grain crisis when farmers from the U.S., Canada and Australia were subsidized by the government to not grow grain to avoid further inflating the global stockpile. There were many experiments that said "Can we look at field size to do crop production forecasting? Can we do crop type mapping? Can we identify this from space?" Now we can predict this much accuracy.
After this, we built systems to provide global monitoring. NASA Harvest, the predecessor to NASA Acres, was developed in 2017 as the global food security and agriculture consortium. It developed a winter wheat yield forecasting model in Kansas that was successfully transitioned to Ukraine.
Q: Is satellite data public? How is it collected?
A: One of the things to note first is that we don't only use NASA data. We use NASA data because it’s the longest record and is incredibly high quality, but we also use a lot of European Space Agency and Japanese Aerospace and Exploration Agency data because all these space agencies work together so we're not launching duplicative missions. We also use commercial satellite imagery data ,which you have to buy, and the U.S. government is a big purchaser of.
Then, turning those satellite image pictures into actual information findings is what we do through collaboration with farmers. The groups adhere to an open data policy, which means anyone can access the data the agencies collect. The information tests are highly contingent depending on what they are. For example, we can develop a vegetation map to track crop 
Monitoring drought from space. (Courtesy: NASA Acres)production but because of privacy issues and concerns around maps, we work with the data owners to not show metrics for individual farms.
Q: How can satellite data monitor field conditions?
A: Improving yield is usually a top priority from the farmers we work with to increase production. We focus on putting more tools that use satellite-based Earth observations in the hands of ag producers like monitoring soil moisture, temperature, soil nutrients and much more. Whole field points from satellite data can map the numbers as a continuous layer to create a picture in the model.
Q: Is there a possibility of using this mapping to document crop insurance damages?
A: We've seen this internationally a lot with index insurance. The type of data we have can help better identify the actual risk for the insurance companies, which can make premiums more affordable to the different growers.
We've also helped streamline some of the processes of insurance loss adjustment. This has mostly been done internationally so far, but we're trying to have a similar impact in the U.S. For example, trying to make efficiencies to streamline the process so you don't have to spend $10 million and three months on loss adjustment. Remote sensing could make a better process, especially because the costs would return the payments to farmers much sooner than waiting four or more months for the loss adjustment process to come through.
G20 GEOGLAM Crop Monitor
Global Crop Conditions. (Courtesy: NASA Acres)
Q: What role does satellite technology have in monitoring global food security? ,
A: The food security implication of this is huge. For example, there's lots of aid organizations that do work in Africa, and it's really important that you don't send food when it's not needed, because you prefer to support the local economy. You can push producers out of business. But, you also don't want to fail in sending food when it's needed because of the humanitarian implications. So, it's quite important to get that right. There's multiple organizations that are monitoring it, so I started looking at their reports and they disagreed like 70% of the time. These aid organizations are not competing with one another, right? They want to be effective with their resources.
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The crop monitor for early warning was released in 2016 monitoring a few major crops: Corn, soy and rice. Instead of just the big commodity industries of agriculture, it brought together the ministries of agriculture and nations around the world in the early warning community to work together and come to agreement about what the situation was and the outlook on production. It's not just the current conditions, but also the potential. This was established as a G20 initiative and takes input from the USDA chief economist as well as economists in countries across the globe to develop a coherent perspective from all of the information available to us at the exact same time.
Advancement in satellite imaging over time. (Courtesy: NASA Acres)Q: What are the biggest opportunities for U.S. agriculture with this technology?
A: Building on international success and those models that have worked at a large scale, we now have a better opportunity than ever before because of better satellite technology with improvements in the pixelation of images, monitoring and modeling. We're working hand in hand with farmers to develop these models because they asked for it. They want to know what's happening. They also want to know the global impact to monitor international competition, for example, and recently to monitor crop conditions in Ukraine.
The people who do remote sensing historically existed in little bubbles. That's what makes us so good. What we do is eyes-on-the-prize work, where you spend your whole career making a tiny dent in a large array of data. You've got to think a little bit more broadly about power dynamics, trade markets and competition across the value chain to make a broader impact. That's why NASA Acres exists. I'm basically a bridge between the science world and the people who need it.
Q: What’s your background, Alyssa, and how did you get involved in such a specific career field?
A: I grew up in California surrounded by a family of winemakers where I found an interest in agriculture. I became pretty acutely aware of what happens when there's a difficult harvest and how that can complicate things for the business and family for years to come. In my family, we almost lost the land. Those in agriculture are so dependent on nature, and yet there's also things you can do as a farmer to help so you have a better outcome.
When I was in college, I eventually ended up doing remote sensing working on forest cover change. I realized this is the kind of information that would be helpful for people making difficult decisions by narrowing down 1,000 different possibilities to 10. This work creates a more clear crystal ball for farmers.
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