The next revolution

BY TOM BUTTON

It's being hailed as the birth of a new era for agriculture: A flock of satellites and airplanes will criss-cross Ontario this summer, snapping "pictures" of the farm fields below.

Canada's farmers have been the world's swiftest adopters of using satellites to plot a precise location on the globe. Coupled with combine yield monitors, the GPS-based systems are opening up new vistas for farm management.

Soon, getting into GPS will seem like taking your first baby steps. The positioning technology itself will seem like a hand-held calculator compared to the sophisticated mainframes offered by the satellites.

These satellites will "see" the crops, and they'll also see what makes them tick. Until now, farmers have had to rely on their senses of sight, smell and touch to figure out what's going on with their crops - operating like 19th-century battlefield doctors before the advent of diagnostic technology. Call it the art of farming.

With satellites, science takes off. Farmers will have the equivalent of a CAT-scan plus an MRI, plus an x-ray unit - a hospital full of sophisticated diagnostic equipment that can "take" 400 simultaneous pictures per acre of their farm fields. And it will all happen in what's called "real" time.

Just hours after the satellite has flown past, farmers will be able to access a complete readout on their crops.

That future is just on the horizon, and an impressive amount of ground work is underway to be sure agriculture is ready to take advantage of the new science, called remote sensing. Many of the most impressive steps are being taken right here in Canada.

Last summer, Cargill teamed with the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing to study 15,000 acres from Alliston through to Glencoe, using sensors mounted in an airplane to figure out what they could learn from a satellite image.

"We're three, maybe five, years away from offering the service to farmers," says Clinton Cargill manager Dennis O'Connor. "It can't just be information - it has to be useful, it has to be accessible, and it has to be timely."

Last year's test runs showed the system is accurate. Field maps drawn by remote sensing were virtual carbon copies of maps produced by on-the-ground yield monitors.

Based on scientific theory and experimental results, the saying "the sky's the limit" is about to take on a whole new meaning.

O'Connor sees farmers turning to satellites to fine tune their fertilizer applications. Satellites would peer inside crop tissues and analyze their nutrient content, so farmers would know whether to alter their P and K programs for future crops. Satellites could also be used after heavy rains to tell whether a corn crop's nitrogen was starting torun out; the grower would know whether it would pay to sidedress.

Satellites will also measure weed emergence, helping farmers choose optimum spray timing. The satellite will even be able to tell which weed species are present, so growers would get help in choosing the best herbicide treatment. Already, the Cargill project is trying to learn how to identify ragweed and nightshade.

As well, satellites could measure moisture stress, pinpoint silking date and accurately predict yields several weeks before harvest, O'Connor says.

Growers will always need their GPS yield monitors, O'Connor says. The two systems will work hand in glove, each helping to verify the results of the other. Even so, there's a lot that remote sensing can offer that's far beyond the capabilities of yield monitors.

This year, the research team will take a much more intensive look at farm fields, says Heather McNairn, ag specialist for the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing. The focus will be on radar waves, preparing agriculture to take maximum advantage of Canada's new RadarSat II satellite when it's blasted into orbit in 2001.

In contrast to the visible light images available through American and French satellites, radar waves can be used day or night, and aren't affected by clouds, McNairn explains. Canada already has RadarSat I in orbit, and because of projects ranging from watching for icebergs that float into shipping lanes to keeping an eye out for forest fire conditions, the country has become a world leader in understanding radar images.

RadarSat II, McNairn adds, will offer much finer detail: Farmers may be able to track plots as small as 10 metres square, compared to the one kilometre squares typically available today. Plus, it will offer more bands and much more accuracy.

Since radar images are affected by moisture, growers may be able to use RadarSat II to pick the optimum day for planting, McNairn says. As well, the images may track the level of plant stress in a field, the amount of chlorophyll a crop is producing, as well as detect specific disease or insect damage in time for growers to spray.

Significantly, RadarSat II will provide updated images every three days, compared to every 16 to 26 days for current optical satellites.

The technology opens so many new windows, the challenge is to know where to look, McNairn says. Because satellites are able to capture reflections ranging from infra-red through to long-wave radar, they can "see" crops in ways that nobody has ever seen them before. The question is: What have we been missing?

In the U.S., DeKalb Genetics has already patented a remote sensing system to help its breeders select new hybrids and varieties. The company says the system will help it monitor how well its test varieties grow through stressful conditions such as drought and heat, and will help it pick which varieties to advance into commercial screening trials.

These are the same fields that breeders walk through every day. From space, however, they'll gain a better picture of the varieties.

Other U.S. companies are investing in remote sensing. Farmland Industries, whose 1,500 outlets and $10 billion a year sales make it the largest U.S. farm co-operative, has launched an ambitious satellite project. Links with Ontario outlets, including Hensall Co-op, may extend the services north of the border.

Not everyone is holding their breath, however. Todd Peterson, head of the emerging technologies unit at Pioneer Hi-Bred in the U.S., spends his days fine tuning how growers can get more out of their GPS and yield monitor units.

Before he puts more effort into remote sensing, Peterson says, the technology must prove that it can make a dollars and cents difference to farmers. "The promise to identify our problems from a satellite has been oversold," Peterson says. "Too much has been over-promised and under-delivered."

Peterson believes satellites will eventually become mainstays in farm management, but that's still many years away. He places part of the blame for the current hype on the downsizing of U.S. military budgets. Suddenly, companies that dreamed of making billions from Star Wars research are being forced to find civilian uses for their bomb-guiding and spy-snooping satellites.

"We're probably a decade away from a good yield prediction system," he says. "We're keeping our toe in the water....Right now, we don't know if the water is getting warmer or colder."

Satellites have been tracking wide-area yields for decades. The Canadian Wheat Board, for instance, makes sales decisions based on forecasts it gets through the Crop Information System. In the U.S., Maryland based EarthSat boasts its forecasts, which started in 1969, come within three per cent of USDA estimates that aren't available until several months after harvest.

Like Peterson, Ted Huffman, head of an Ottawa-based team of federal agriculture department scientists, is also leery of overpraising the satellite technology. In Huffman's case, however, it's an effort. Research to date has convinced him that agriculture is about to enter a new era.

It's hard even to guess at all the impacts, he says. A couple years ago, satellites would be able to "see" in three to seven bands of reflected wavelengths. New probes will see 250, from infra-red to radar.

Plus, researchers are already working out the logistics for farmers to get maximum use from the data. They're looking at downloading systems and at ways to translate 'invisible pictures' into field maps and other forms that farmers can understand and react to.

"Within five years, we'll be able to show you what's going on in your fields," Huffman says. "Within 10 years, you'll turn on your computer and get specific management recommendations.

"The growth curve for this technology is, well, to say it's dramatic is to underrate it."

Asked to sum up how satellites will change the way farmers manage their crops, Huffman captures the space cadet spirit with a single-word answer: "Totally."

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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