Landsat's Role in Feeding the World

"A vision to observe Earth for the benefit of all…" — Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, 1966

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts 9.7 billion people at the world's table by 2050. That will take more crops, more livestock, and more efficient, sustainable farming — and Landsat.

The longest-running Earth-observing satellite system, Landsat is already vital to food production:

• Farmers check crop health and stress with Landsat vegetation indices.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) uses satellite data for reports on crop production, condition and progress.
• Federal crop insurers use it to check hail and drought claims.

Landsat 8, May 2016: irrigated with Colorado River water, California's Imperial Valley glows green; across the border in Mexico, where water is scarcer, fields are far less green. USGS.

Born in a food crisis

The first Landsat launched in July 1972, fulfilling Udall's goal of watching Earth's resources from space — amid an agricultural crisis. The Soviet Union had just signed a 3-year deal to buy millions of tons of U.S. wheat and corn at subsidized prices to offset its crop failures, and the U.S., lacking a view of global harvests, was caught off guard. With world grain stocks dwindling and domestic prices rising, Landsat met the need for better crop monitoring.

What it does now

• Crop reports: Landsat's visible and infrared bands identify crop types and vitality, feeding USDA production and yield reports, says geographer Dave Johnson of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Unbiased estimates, from ground surveys validated by Landsat, keep commodity markets from swinging wildly through manipulation.
• Cropland Data Layer: an annual map of farmland across the continental U.S., with more than 100 crop categories. It has also tracked conversions such as wetlands to row crops, and helped businesses find enough corn to site ethanol plants.
• Global monitoring: USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service has used Landsat for 30 years to watch crops overseas, and with the GEOGLAM partnership (launched 2011) tracks growing conditions for wheat, maize, rice and soybeans.
• Managing risk: satellite images show where fields need more fertilizer or have weed problems, says remote-sensing scientist Jim Hipple of USDA's Risk Management Agency.
• An unbiased witness: when farmers report losses from hail, drought or other disasters, Landsat helps the agency check that insurers handled claims properly — comparing vegetation stress with earlier in the season. With 47 years of records, it can verify past events too. "There are no time-traveling devices," Hipple says. "Landsat is a good surrogate for that."

Looking ahead

As a window on the past, Landsat has no equal in satellite history, and its future matters as much. As more people sit down to the world's table each day, leaders will need to figure out how to feed them. They are going to need Landsat.

Sources

Based on Landsat Plays a Key Role in Reducing Hunger on Earth, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2016–3059, version 1.1, September 2019 (DOI; publication page), Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. Its opening and the Landsat 8 image are restored from the fact sheet's PDF. A work of the United States government in the public domain.