Sustaining a Hungry World with Data
The Agriculture program area promotes the use of Earth observations to strengthen food security, support market stability and protect human livelihoods. Together with partners in the United States and around the world, we help bolster food security, improve agricultural resilience and reduce price volatility for vulnerable communities.
Our Focus
Why Agriculture?
NASA is engaging the ag sector to find out what data and tools producers need now and in the future, as they make changes in their management practices to respond to changing weather patterns.
Building on NASA's 60 years of agriculture engagement, we are expanding our scope and providing more data, technology, and resources to help producers mitigate the impact of a changing climate on our nation's ability to feed itself.
Why Now?
Space offers NASA an unique vantage point to study the Earth's systems. NASA's Earth Science Division uses Earth observations from more than 25 missions in orbit around our planet.
Tools for Producers
The global observations Landsat collects are the basis for many tools that producers rely on today, including the U.S. Drought Monitor, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report.
NASA produces other applications for producers, such as NASA Harvest's precision nutrient management tools, OpenET, and Crop-CASMA. These are designed to put data-driven management tools into the hands of farmers.
Free and Open to All
All NASA data is open to the public and freely available, and the agency is dedicated to developing the applications to put the data and scientific findings to work for agricultural producers.
Featured Product
OpenET
OpenET is an web-based tool that provides data for U.S. water management across 23 western states, most notably the area covered by the Colorado River basin. The "ET" in OpenET stands for evapotranspiration, which is the process through which water leaves plants, soils, and other surfaces and returns to the atmosphere. It's a measurement that farmers can use to quantify the amount of water being taken up or used by their fields and crops and that will usually need to be replaced through irrigation or rainfall.
