The Fall Meeting by American Geophysical Union (AGU) is the premier global event dedicated to the advancement of Earth and space sciences. In December of 2023, the event convened over 25,000 attendees from more than 100 countries in San Francisco, California. This year, the conference was centered around the theme “Wide. Open. Science.”, exploring topics on expanding collaboration across disciplines and geographic barriers and discussing ways to make Earth and space data more accessible, transparent, and, ultimately, more impactful. Scientists from NASA Acres and our sister Consortium, NASA Harvest, gathered from across the United States and overseas to attend the event and host a number of oral and poster presentations focused on applications of Earth observations (EO) for agriculture.

In early October, Dr. Steven Wolf, Associate Professor in the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and Research, Development, and Extension (RD&E) Partner of NASA Acres, hosted the Cornell Agtech Innovation Intermediaries and Sustainability Workshop. This two-day, interactive workshop convened a small yet diverse group of academics and practitioners, around 20 individuals from the United States, India, Chile, Germany, Netherlands, England, and Canada. The goal being to engage in a dynamic dialogue around what is known and what needs to be known to understand and strengthen agtech, namely venture capital-backed entrepreneurship applied to agriculture and food, in order to advance sustainable agrifood transitions.

NASA Acres scientists, David Roy and Lin Yan of Michigan State University, are taking a computer-vision approach to extract crop field objects from Landsat satellite time series wall-to-wall in the Conterminous United States (CONUS) annually for 2008-2026, with core processing undertaken in Amazon Web Services (AWS) where the USGS Collection 2 Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) are stored, and the results will be validated using Google-Earth and NASA high spatial-resolution imagery. In areas where fields are too small to be extracted reliably from Landsat 30m images, the commercial high-resolution images will be considered.

On November 2 and 3, NASA Acres hosted our inaugural Kick-Off Meeting at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri, gathering Consortium partners and collaborators from over 40 organizations with a shared commitment to supporting national agriculture and food systems using satellite data and technology.

This event will set the foundation for NASA’s new, U.S.-focused Consortium on agriculture and food security.

Over 50 Consortium partners and collaborators will gather in St. Louis, Missouri this November for the inaugural NASA Acres Kick-Off Meeting. This event is the first Consortium-wide gathering since its formal launch in April of this year. The Consortium is led by the University of Maryland with Research, Development, and Extension Partners at nine other universities and two supporting private organizations, comprising top-of-the field scientists and practitioners in agricultural remote sensing, artificial intelligence, soil science, agronomy, rangelands, sociology, economics, and data policy.