Sustainable Winegrowing with Vineyard Team: 249: Making it Easier to Use Satellite Data in Agriculture (2024)

Oct 17, 2024

NASA has connecteddata about the Earth’s surface since 1972. One of the firstapplications was for agriculture. Alyssa Whitcraft,Executive Director of NASA Acres grew up in the wine industry ather family’s property, Whitcraft Winery, located in Santa BarbaraCalifornia.

Her goal isto make it easier for people and organizations to use satellitedata to improve agriculture. Alyssa explains howdifferent types of satellites including polar-orbiting andgeostationary collect information that can be calibrated againstcrop-specific data to develop predictive models. Farmers can usethese models to identify viral, fungal, bacterial, water, andnutrient stressors and forecast harvest.

While this technologyis being used in commodity crops today, there is a huge opportunityfor specialty crops.

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Transcript

[00:00:00]

[00:00:04] Beth Vukmanic:NASA has collected data about the earth surface since 1972, One ofthe first applications was for agriculture. Welcome to sustainablewine growing with the vineyard team, where we bring you the latestin science and research for the wine industry. I'm Beth. Vukmanicexecutive director. Since 1994 vineyard team has brought you thelatest science-based practices, experts, growers, and wine industrytools through both in-field and online education, so that you cangrow your business. Please raise a glass with us as we cheers to 30years.

[00:00:39] And today's podcast CraigMacmillan, critical resource manager at Niner wine estates withlong time sip certified vineyard and the first ever sip certifiedwinery. Speaks with Alyssa Woodcraft, executive director of NASAacres. She grew up in the wine industry at her family's property.Whitcraft winery located in Santa Barbara, California.

[00:01:01] Alyssa's goal is to make it easierfor people and organizations to use satellite data, to improve ag.Alissa explains how different types of satellites, including polarorbiting and geostationary collect information that can becalibrated against crop specific data to develop predictive models.Farmers can then use these models to identify viral, fungalbacteria, water, and nutrients stressors. And forecast harvest.While, this technology is being used in commodity crops today.There was huge opportunity for specialty crops.

[00:01:35] Alyssa is involved in numerousorganizations and projects. So I highly recommend that you visitour show notes. And check out her website.

[00:01:43] If you want access to moreviticulture research and technology from the world's top experts,then you won't want to miss the premier Winegrowing event of theyear. The sustainable ag expo enjoy the perfect blend of in-personand online learning. Speak directly with national experts. Earnover 20 hours of continuing education and explore sustainable agvendors. It all takes place November 11th through 13th, 2024 in SanLuis Obispo, California. As a listener to this podcast. Make sureyou use discount code podcast 24 at checkout to take $50 off ofyour ticket. Register

[00:02:19] today at sustainableagexpo.org. Nowlet's listen

[00:02:27] Craig Macmillan:Welcome to Sustainable Wine Growing with Vineyard Team. Our guesttoday is Alyssa Whitcraft. She is Executive Director of NASA Acres,and we're going to talk about all kinds of exciting stuff thatshe's involved with, and I'll let her explain those. Thanks forbeing on the podcast, Alyssa.

[00:02:43] Alyssa Whitcraft:Thank you for inviting me.

[00:02:45] Craig Macmillan:You're involved in a whole bunch of different projects andconsortiums and programs mostly around remote sensing andagriculture.

[00:02:53] And you're excited about a numberof different things in your field. What exactly is your field? Ithink it's a good place to start because I think a lot of peopledon't understand what it is.

[00:03:01] Alyssa Whitcraft:I'm a geographer, which is basically the world's oldest discipline.We use the lens of space and place and location to understand theworld. And knowing that things that are near to one another tend tohave more in common than things that are far from one another. Andsimilarly, we know that where you are in the world matters for allsorts of different things. And that's really the lens through whichI see and understand the world. Specifically within geography,because geography is a very broad discipline, my expertise is inusing satellite data and other Earth observations to understandwhat's happening across the world in principally agriculture. I'vedone work in the past in forestry as well.

[00:03:47] Craig Macmillan:What kinds of things does this field have coming in the future?What are the things that you're most excited about in terms of allthe different work that you're doing?

[00:03:55] Alyssa Whitcraft:Would it be helpful if I gave a little bit of history, or is thattoo much info?

[00:03:59] Craig Macmillan: .Please, please.

[00:04:01] Alyssa Whitcraft:Sure. So a lot of people don't realize that satellite data has beencollected of the Earth's surface since 1972. NASA launched itsfirst satellite back then, and one of its first applications wasagriculture. It was really for looking at global forecasting,production forecasting, and things like that in areas where Wecouldn't gather statistics like the USSR, for example. And so thatwas very early.

[00:04:29] They thought, hey, we really needto understand what's happening with the global food production,global food supply. What kind of prices are we going to be able toget? Those were the very earliest experiments. And a lot of yearshave passed since then. It's 52 years now. That particularsatellite was called Landsat. Well, it's called ERTS 1. It's been,renamed Landsat 1 in hindsight and they've just launched Landsat 9two years ago. So we've really, we have a lot of series of it nowwith continuity of data for 52 years from that satellite, thatmission alone. there's a huge plethora of other types of datathough that are also collected. Landsat, for example, itscharacteristics are, it passes over the same place every 16 days atabout 30 meter resolution. So 100 feet by 100 feet, about afootball field, and then there's other satellites that pass overevery day and they might have much coarser spatial resolution. So250 meters by 250 meters, for example. And then there's alsorecently, because storage is cheap and the Internet is fast,there's a proliferation of these very fine spatial resolutionsatellites where you can tell almost down to the plant level.

[00:05:38] Definitely tree level, what you'relooking at, that's quite fine in resolution and still have somedegree of rich spectral information. And what I mean when I saythat is basically everything around us is reflecting light all thetime or emitting light. And we only see a little tiny piece of it,the visible spectrum.

[00:06:00] That's why it's called the visible.But there's so much richness, on both sides of the visiblespectrum. So longer wavelengths and shorter wavelengths, and theytell us all kinds of things about what's going on with a surface.we see vegetation as green because that's what it's reflecting. Butthere's other things in near infrared that can tell us aboutvegetation health. Or sort of mid range infrared that can tell usabout water stress, things like this. And so now we have more andmore spectral information, more and more frequently and finer andfiner spatial resolution.

[00:06:35] So our ability to see a great dealof detail has come a really long way. And still just like kind ofany instrument you use, your ability to do something useful with itis contingent upon its quality and also the quality of the kind ofscience that you use to interpret the data and turn it intoinformation.

[00:06:58] Craig Macmillan:What kinds of information is this data being turned into? And onwhat kinds of or agrosystems?

[00:07:06] Alyssa Whitcraft:All over the world. There's two broad classes of satellites. One iscalled polar orbiting. So it's going around the poles and itreturns to look at the same spot every, you know, it's governed byits orbit and a couple of other things. I said Landsat was 16 days,for example and others can be much more frequently or even longer.So that's one kind, polar orbiting. The other type isgeostationary, which means that as the earth turns, it's alwayslooking at the same spot. And that's what most of the sort ofweather satellites are. So that's why you can get really likefrequently every 15 minutes, like a radar image, for example. allthat's to say, like a lot of the satellites we use are polarorbiting, and that means it's not biased toward only collectingdata over the United States.

[00:07:48] It's collecting data all over theworld. In the past, because. storage was expensive. There wasn'tvery much storage capacity on the spacecrafts. You couldn't storeit all. They used to have to select which images they were going tocapture. So it might be passing over a surface, but it wouldn'tturn the camera on. And only about, I want to say 2012, 2013 waswhen Landsat started acquiring almost every single opportunity. Andnot just capturing something like A third of the daylit scenes thatcould capture every day. so all that's to say, we now have like somuch rich coverage the last 12 or so years with that kind ofsatellite. So that means like we're getting observations of theearth's surface where everywhere agriculture is grown at leastevery day, depending on the type of satellite you're talking about.And even for the finer resolution ones, you're getting it everyday. 10 days, maybe once you are to 20 days once you account forcloud cover in a lot of areas.

[00:08:44] Craig Macmillan:what kinds of decisions can people make regarding how they farmbased on this kind of information? And my understanding is thatthis is public information, is that correct?

[00:08:53] Alyssa Whitcraft:What I talked about was sort of where you can collect information.It's all over. It's not you know, biased toward any particularregion per se. By virtue of that, it's not necessarily biasedtoward any one crop because it's collecting all those data. Sothose observations exist, but our ability to turn them intoinformation is contingent upon how much we've studied that, thatitem. And, and how much what it, the light that it reflects in thesatellite picks up on is related to whatever it is that we'retrying to study. So that's to say if a satellite only collectsvisible information, then we're not going to be able to talk aboutsort of some of the items associated with chlorophyll content andlike health of the plant. Or if it doesn't collect the longinfrared or mid infrared you're going to miss out on informationabout water, things like that.

[00:09:41] And that's just kind of asimplified answer to that piece. And so we're able to collect allkinds of variables. In my work, we've called them essentialagriculture variables. they're basically core building blocks,variables that we can measure and infer about the earth based onsatellite data about the state, what the change has been over timeand what the forecast is to the future.

[00:10:02] We can look at, Hey, what kind ofcrop is being cultivated here right now? We can see how has thatchanged over the last 10 years? We can look at, okay, this is thecurrent condition. What's the forecast for harvest this year?different things like that. We can also do within season detectionof certain stressors, biotic and abiotic stress.

[00:10:22] So you know, can be viral, fungal,bacterial diseases water stress that can help with precision kindof irrigation scheduling. We can also look at you know, when youcouple that with like short term weather forecasts, you can see,okay, there's going to be really high demand evaporative demand.And so we need to think about maybe irrigating or doing somethingin advance to prep the vegetation for that. You can also use it fornutrient applications. So, this is primarily in row crops so notreally vineyards per se. But, we can take a look at what thecurrent nutrient status is. Nitrogen, if it's nitrogen deficient,then you are only applying what it needs and not too much. Samegoes with pesticides. You're not just doing blanket spraying. Youcan do early detection and mitigation. With nitrogen, you onlyapply how much is needed and where it's needed, which has importantenvironmental benefits. It also helps the farmers sort of bottomline, not wasting money. And also in terms of a fertile excessfertilizer being applied and also not leaving money on the farm bynot applying enough. It can be really helpful in kind of zeroing inon what intervention needs to be done and what you can prepare forat the end of the season.

[00:11:32] Craig Macmillan:I'm just thinking through this, so you would have to have some cropspecific, and maybe even region specific on the ground work inorder to make the connection, the correlation between, I'm gettingthis reading, and then this is what's going on with the plants.

[00:11:47] Alyssa Whitcraft:Yes. Yep. That's completely accurate. And I'm really glad you saidit because there is a perspective on satellite data that it'smagic, that you just take the image and you have the information.And that's just like not really how it works. Now we're gettingmore and more sophisticated models out there, but all models haveto be trained on something. And just because I've trained it on aton of corn in Iowa doesn't mean it's going to work on corn inArgentina. Like that's just not necessarily how these things work.some people call it ground truth. I prefer to call it trainingdata, validation data. you know, in situ site data, things likethat, comparison data. And the reason for that nuance is just tosay that there is error in all measurement. So just because if yourscale is calibrated wrong and you say, this is, this was myharvest, this was my yield, then that's not necessarily groundtruthed see what I mean? So, and I think that that's an importantpoint to make because we're trying to add an additional piece ofmeasurement to the picture, right?

[00:12:48] It can give you more frequent. morecoverage deeper spectral information. It can a lot, but it's apiece, it's a component of a multi source decision support system.We say like garbage in garbage out on the remote sensing side ofthings. Our observations are very good, but you know, we're talkingabout hundreds of millions of dollars of engineering in the sensorsand the satellites to go up into space. So those are incrediblyhigh quality and the space agencies who fly them they do a lot ofexpensive CalVal, it's called, so they go and they make sure thatthe instruments like, you know, The analogy in your kitchen wouldbe you stick your thermometer in boiling water to make sure 212Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius is exactly what your thermometeris picking up, right? So we do the same thing with satellites.that's great for the reflectance or for the wavelengths, but that'snot information. So then what we go out, we might take some tissuesamples. To understand what's happening with nutrients with pestand disease stuff, some soil samples for that purpose. Or for someof the more like workhorse, what we've been doing with satellitedata for a lot longer, those are more novel applications. The lotmuch longer is what's growing where where it is. What's the season.Like why is it. Kind of just at the early part, is it flowering,reproductive, is it toward harvest and then also yield.

[00:14:09] And so we go out, we take cropcuts, we do things like that, then we calibrate our observations orour models against those data, and then we can run a predictivemodel that can tell us for the same site in another year, or morecommonly you take it from that site and then generalize it. towhere you have satellite data that are continuous, like so you havea whole an image, but you don't have any training data from thisvineyard over here. So you take the training data from thisvineyard and see if you can use it to identify what's happening inother vineyards. And then you assess, how well did I do off ofanother set of data that's from the ground.

[00:14:46] Craig Macmillan:And so I would imagine that that kind of work is done extensivelyin agronomic crops, or what we might call staple crops, you know,rice, maize, soy, things like that, wheat. But you can do this withspecialty crops as well. You mentioned vineyards. If there isinterest and if there is funding, we can do this kind of work andbring vineyards into this this, this kind of process, this kind ofscience.

[00:15:11] Alyssa Whitcraft:Yeah. I mean, you're spot on. Like I said earlier, the earliestapplications of satellite data. Were in kind of global productionforecasting with the reason being that wheat prices, for example,are incredibly correlated with conflict. So as wheat prices go up,you see more human conflict. And so these are the huge drivers ofglobal trends in prices, in food security, all these kinds ofthings that are really important to track. And so the, you know,the early app applications were really for that type of crop andfor very large scale forecasting in the sort of 80s, 90s was whenyou started to see some of the precision management. So on farminformation but perhaps not as much as people hoped for in in thiskind of satellite world, there was a lot of unsuccessful startupsand, and things like that. I think the big reason for that is like,if you're going out and scouting your 10 acre vineyard, like youcan generally walk it. It's not a big deal. You're not driving acombine through. My family's in the wine business and I grew upwalking vineyards with my dad and taking tissue samples and takingfruit samples and doing things like, it was just a part of the day,you know, if you're farming 10, 000 acres, that's not viable.

[00:16:30] And so you're, you have, milliondollar combine to these days and things like that. That's somethingwith autonomous driving, you can program a great deal ofinformation into it. sort of like historically, there just wasn'tnecessarily the, like. The demand for what satellite data couldoffer, you know, it was focused on kind of like yield and nutrientsand water.

[00:16:49] There just wasn't the same use casein, in specialty crops. In a lot of ways, especially since some ofthem are growing greenhouses. So like, we're kind of out of luckwith that. And so, yeah, whoops, but that things have just changed.We have better satellites now that collect more information morespectral information, higher spatial resolution, more frequently,we can process so much more data now, which means.

[00:17:14] we can kind of just keep throwingmore and more data at a model until it picks up some signal that wenever could have anticipated. That's kind of the basis of machinelearning or artificial intelligence is that you just keep goinglike feeding it until you see if something comes out. That also hasits own problems.

[00:17:31] Pretty funny fails AI. I thinkwe've seen before the models get overtrained and it's very. clearthat they don't work once they're over trained. They, they spit outlike a baby with three hands AI image. And you're like, that's not,that's not right. Or I saw a matzah ball on a plate. It was like,rather than like a soup dumpling, it was like a tennis ball thatwas like matzah colored. I was like, that's not right either. Youknow, it's funny things like that. So the same thing can happenwhen we're looking at, you know, the earth's surface as well.

[00:18:00] Craig Macmillan:you are executive director of NASA Acres. That name has come up ina couple of other interviews. Could you explain, , what NASA Acresis and what you folks do?

[00:18:09] Alyssa Whitcraft:Yeah, sure thing.

[00:18:10] So NASA Acres is NASA's U. S.focused Applied Sciences

[00:18:15] So why, that's kind of a longtitle, NASA is principally a research agency. Now, it's not it'snot USDA where it does farm services or loans or reports onstatistics and agriculture. It's famous for people putting a man onthe moon and missions to Mars, but NASA has this whole huge earthscience division. within that, there's you know, the, the componentthat's dedicated to launching the satellites and making the datareally high quality. And then there's an accessible data, highquality and data accessible. And then there's sort of like the corefoundational research, which is. We've never used satellite data tomeasure this thing before, or we have used satellite data, but nowwe're just going to apply it elsewhere and do a study that resultsin a paper.

[00:18:56] So we learn a thing. That'sresearch and analysis in NASA, and then there's applied sciencesand earth action, which is, it's kind of new manifestation in NASA,which is like trying to take this data and really make an impact,really get the information, the data, the tools in the hands ofpeople who are addressing, in our case, agriculturalchallenges.

[00:19:19] So that's farmers, that's ranchers.That's people in the ag value chain that's ag retailers, all the, Imean, there's a whole bunch of people in here who can benefit insome way from this data. And our job is to work with them toadvance the science as much as possible because NASA's brand isreally like quality, right?

[00:19:39] And then, but also neutrality. Andso we kind of just try and lift. the floor, so to speak, make thequality as good as possible, advance the science, and then hopethat the private sector that's out there that's serving people inagriculture can sustain the services or, and, and really be addingvalue to people in agriculture long, long after our projectsend.

[00:20:00] Craig Macmillan:And so that, that's going to be where the next link is, is theprivate sector picking up this information, this data, and thenfiguring out how they can use it for their client base, maybe for aspecific crop or a specific region, and then we can we'll see somedevelopment there. we've seen with like material science, I thinkis a classic example of that, you know the space program resultedin a lot of advances in materials that now we don't even thinkabout. They're part of our everyday life,

[00:20:27] Alyssa Whitcraft:Yeah, like the blankets run a

[00:20:30] NASA, more than just Tang, youknow, when I'm trying to like get across to people that, the planetwe study most is Earth to quote Karen St. Germain, who's the EarthScience Division Director for NASA. I mean, material science is areally good example, but we have it so much in all these thingsthat like, be them weather and climate services That's, you know,Noah's job principally to create the kind of forecasting modelsthat are pushed out when we're talking about the United States.

[00:21:02] There's people all over the worlddoing it and then like weather channel or weather underground orwhatever, build services on top of that. And then that's like whatfaces the consumer. So it's all kind of a part of an importantchain. And in fact, NASA is in the background collaborating withNoah on this information as well. for us in the agriculture side ofthings NASA harvest, which still continues today as NASA's globalagriculture applied sciences program. But from 2017, when itstarted until 2022, it was the whole kit and caboodle. So both usglobal international, the whole thing. And then they split theprograms.

[00:21:39] So into Acres and Harvest. I wasthe deputy director and program manager for NASA Harvest from whenit started until I took over the helm and founded NASA Acres in2023. NASA Harvest, there's a great example of commercialization orof, of really strong collaboration with the private sector. Whichis when the Ukraine war began there was obviously a huge hole ininformation all of a sudden about what on earth was going to happenwith the food that comes out of Ukraine, which between Russia andUkraine, it's 30 percent of the world's wheat, wheat's verycorrelated with conflict to begin with. And there's certainpartners who are a hundred percent reliant upon imports fromUkraine and or Russia of wheat. , you don't just go drive down thestreet to the next grocery store and pick up your wheat. Like thisis billions, trillions of dollars of movement that can't pivotovernight. So the potential implications were massive. And the moreinformation you have earlier to plan for that, the better. Andthat's where satellite data came to bear. You couldn't send fieldagents out when there's an active war happening to be like, whatwas planted? Is it growing? Are farmers? Applying nutrients.

[00:22:50] Is it going to be harvested? Thingslike that. NASA Harvest partnered with a number of organizations,but one was a private space company called Planet who collects submeter and three meter data. daily with they have many, many smallsatellites and so they're, these are not the three, 400 millionsatellites that NASA flies.

[00:23:08] These are much less expensive andthey can fly way more of them. They're much smaller. They're a verydifferent satellite. But they're great for getting high spatialresolution often. And when you can't go out and collect grounddata. to do training on your images. Was this planted? Was this notplanted?

[00:23:25] This appears to be this crop. Thisappears to be this crop. Satellite data of that kind are veryhelpful. And so then we would use that to train some of the othersatellites that have perhaps richer spectral information or otherqualities that we might look for in a certain analysis.

[00:23:40] And because we had this partnershipwith Planet, they were going out and collecting the data. We wereable to do this analysis. talk about, you know, what we expected tosee in terms of wheat harvest that year and sunflower and corn andrapeseed and all these really critical crops that Ukraine exportsand help us prepare and mitigate any potential food security crisisand then Planet.

[00:24:03] On the flip side, they've suddenlymade a huge impact with their data. And they've additionally beenable to, you know, we do a lot of work on the. nitty gritty of theengineering of radiometric calibration and things like that. Wealso can support them in improving their imagery. And then now theyhave a use case in agriculture and all these different kind ofthings by partnering with us. But we've also advanced the modelsand the science and the knowledge that's all a public benefit. Andso that's like a really lovely investment from the federalgovernment that kind of has this big societal benefit, but thenalso supports the private sector and continued innovation andservices.

[00:24:37] Craig Macmillan:in this case, it allows for the prediction of what may be availableright?

[00:24:43] Alyssa Whitcraft:Yeah. In that example, for sure. The war broke out in February andthe winter wheat harvest would have been, gosh, like may to June.You're looking to see how was the, was this coming back afterwinter? We're, what was the condition of the crop at a baseline?Were people able to apply nutrients of any kind? And once harvesttime came. Were people able to go down in the field to harvest ordid they not do it because they had been killed or evacuated orbecause there's unexploded ordinances in their field and thingslike this.

[00:25:13] And so that was really thebeginning of the analysis and then it, it continued for other cropsinto the future. And it's a really rich ongoing project about whichyou can find copious resources online.

[00:25:26] Craig Macmillan:how are we doing on, on those areas? Are there people that arestepping up in the private sector to work on that.

[00:25:31] Alyssa Whitcraft:Definitely. Yeah, there are. The public sector, you know, my sideof the house is too. but it's interesting. it's an interestingpoint because we focus so much on agronomic crops. We've done thatbecause there's a really clear reason to invest public dollars. Ithink the very early stage collaboration with the private sectorfor specialty crops is much more critical than it was for thesekind of big agronomic crops. So that means from the odd outset. theprojects need to have very engaged partners from the privatesector. It might be in the form of just working directly with thevineyard so that they can kind of maybe collect some of the grounddata or if we're developing a tool, they can kind of like test itand provide feedback, things like that.

[00:26:14] But then there's going to be othercircumstances where we might be trying to use a compendium ofinformation. So you might be using some soil sensing to look atwater status. But it's like, you can't place a million of them inyour field. So, you know, you might take the benefit, the accuracy,the depth that you get from those expensive and ground instruments,and then try to pair them with the satellites and then build likekind of a hybrid measurement system.

[00:26:41] You get the benefit of the updatefrequency the satellites and the spatial coverage, of course. Andthen you get like the really good quality. measurements within thefield. we've seen a lot of burgeoning partnerships in specialtycrops and of course also agronomic commodity crops as well, butwhere we're trying to look at a hybrid network of in ground sensorsor canopy sensors or drones. side canopy robots that my colleagueKatie Gold, who was on your, podcast before, she uses these robots,Katie Gold and Yu Jiang, her collaborator at Cornell to, to sort ofbuild toward the long term adoption of, of these, actually not evenlong term, to build toward the short and medium term adoption ofthese things, because that's real, it's really going to sustainthem, NASA projects. typically three years acres and harvests areeach in five year kind of increments harvest was renewed and Forits global work and spit off its domestic work. And so hopefully wewill be renewed as well But it's not the design of federal researchto like provide every service forever We need to work with thepeople who need the information Because they're gonna tell us whatto do and what like what matters to them You and then we need towork with the people who can kind of own the services long term andmaintain those high touch relationships with their customers,growers, ag retailers, whomever it might be.

[00:28:04] Craig Macmillan:Spain, places like that Australia?

[00:28:06] Alyssa Whitcraft:You this is an area I'm definitely less comfortable talking about.within NASA Acres, we really only have Katie and you's projectthat's in specialty crops. And that's principally just by virtue ofall the things I described. It's really only been the last four orfive years that this stuff has started blossoming. And even withinKatie's project. She's not using satellite data really, right now,she's done some demonstration stuff. We're preparing for a NASAinstrument to launch in 2028. And we're doing years of preparatorywork. NASA has an airborne fleet. People don't know that. And it'scollecting very similar data to what will on this satellite SBG.Also, there's a sensor mounted on. The International Space Stationcalled EMIT that also collects similar information. So we'realready using that, but we're kind of like priming the pump forprimetime, right? So Katie is very, Katie is like a very kind ofahead of the curve kind of situation person. The spectroscopy ofthe laboratory stuff, we all, we all know that it's been around fora long time, but the imaging capability to do it outside is novel.And so she and Yu are kind of working together on that. I don'thave another project in my portfolio that does that right now. Weare looking at using those data similarly, the hyperspectral iswhat it's called, data. We're starting to try and build use casesin rangeland monitoring as well for rotational grazing.

[00:29:33] So looking at forage quality, it'snot just a matter of whether the biomass comes back, it's whetherit's the right biomass, so the right mixture of different crops. Ifyou've overgrazed an area, you'll just get like the one dominant.type of grass will come back, and that's not very nutrient dense,and it's not very sustainable, it's not very regenerative. If youdon't overgraze an area, then things will grow back in a morebalanced way, and that's something that we're trying to explore,how well satellites can pick up that heterogeneity in thelandscape. That's an example there. I'm aware of some work in sortof olive groves in Spain, in Italy And I know there are somecompanies who have attempted to do kind of proxy measurements ofshade coffee and cocoa. Very high value crops, but you can't seethem because they're under the canopy of another tree. And there'sbeen a lot of different experimental ways of trying to get at that.But in terms of my understanding of how successful those differentcases have been. It's a little outside my wheelhouse. It's prettynovel. and yeah, I mean, I, the, the thing about being an appliedsciences program, we're not the foundational research RNA. So whatthat means is like, we've got to kind of see the sciencedemonstrated fairly firmly for it to move into a major part of theportfolio.

[00:30:53] That said, like there are someprojects in my portfolio that are higher risk or that like, youknow, that delivery might be a few years off because of the lack ofinstrumentation. And there are some stuff that's more experimental,but where those are the case like that Rangeland project or Katie'sproject That's because we have super engaged users already. Sothere's ranchers who are at the table for another purpose. Katieis, you know, an extension agent for Cornell working with grape andapple growers, and they want to know how to manage this.

[00:31:23] So she already has engaged parties.So having the satellite stuff be like maybe a little bit morenascent and its development cycle is okay versus, you know, wherewe don't necessarily have the strongest user. identified andpartnered already, we're kind of relying on the more matureapplications and starting to kind of transition that stuff out morequickly to broader audiences.

[00:31:45] Craig Macmillan:How can the wine grape industry or other crops, support this andencourage research in their particular area?

[00:31:54] Alyssa Whitcraft:There's legwork on both sides meaning that we need to be with thecommunities we live and work in. Thank you. to get those peopleinvolved in what we have to offer. So it's like there's a trustbuilding component, there's an awareness building component andthen there's also just the participate if somebody contacts youabout being in a study or, you know, by word of mouth, Oh, thisvineyard down the road is doing it.

[00:32:17] Like, maybe we'll do it here. Itrust that person's discretion, so I'll do it here. Collaboratingand being active in that research from the NASA acres perspectiveis, is really important. And more than just really from the NASAacres perspective, from really the kind of, you know, we'reneutral, we're trying to build quality, we're trying to raise thefloor.

[00:32:36] So even if you come, you know, youcome through us, we hopefully make things better, which feeds backbenefits to you in your, in your operation, but also to your kindof broader industry. So there are some vineyards, for example thatI have personal relationships with from my whole life. And whenKatie and I started collaborating and, you know, just generallysharing passions for a number of things, including wine and remotesensing, She asked if I had any, you know, friends who would lether take tissue samples who thought they might have particulardiseases or were just curious to collaborate so that she could kindof do this proof of concept of these technologies and do thesestudies. And I was like, yeah, probably. So I just shot a couple offriends text messages and they were all like, sure. And the thingis, is like, they know me, right? And so they know that I'm notgoing to Never do anything intentional to bring harm. And Icertainly would also go work very hard to make sure that evensomething I hadn't foreseen was protected. And I think that that'sactually so critical, probably in every industry, but I'm mostcomfortable in agriculture. Like these are strong communities oftrust that are built up. You know, you knew my dad and when I was15 he had a major surgery in kind of mid, late August whichcoincides nicely with harvest, the beginning of harvest.

[00:33:57] Craig Macmillan:Yeah, the wine grape harvest in california.

[00:33:59] Alyssa Whitcraft:exactly. My dad was a winemaker in in Santa Barbara County, andthat's where I grew up And I grew up in the winery so yeah when Iwas 15 He got he got really sick And he had to have a surgery andhe was in the ICU for like a week and after that like it takes awhile to recover so people that he had mentored, people who he hadbeen close with for, you know, 20 odd years, 25 years in, in theregion just kind of stepped up and processed his fruit, youknow?

[00:34:28] So one, you miss one harvest,you're donezo, you know? Like that's just not how things work inthe wine business. And my brother, who's now the winemaker, wasonly 19 at the time. So like, technically he wasn't even old enoughto drink wine legally, but like, you know, he was there kind of.Running the ship with, you know, the huge support of these familyfriends who made it happen. So all that's to say, like those trustnetworks are everything in, in agriculture and everything in sortof agri food and like I said, probably other industries too, but Ijust don't know them. That's certainly the case in agriculture. Andwe're not going to make any like progress unless we build thosetrust relationships.

[00:35:08] And then since we can't meeteverybody face to face, we need you know, those people to then bethe hinge points to bring their, their kind of collaborators,colleagues, friends business partners, whatever, to the table totell us what they need, to tell us what they want, give us feedbackon what we've done and then work with us if they see value.

[00:35:27] Craig Macmillan:Yeah, I'm thinking of there are a number of organizations in theUnited States, in the wine industry, that fund or promote researchon particular topics, and I can see there might be an openingthere. you know, talking about trust, folks that have gottenawards, farmers that have been collaborators on these projects. Ithink it's a good place to start. For these new technologies. Ithink it's an interesting idea. I hadn't really thought about itthat way. And I'm definitely going to take, take that away with mewhen I go to some of, these meetings. , and some of these, , someof these, , review, , committee

[00:35:57] Alyssa Whitcraft:Related to that, so one of the things we're just beginning to kindof explore the logistics of how we would implement it isidentifying sort of farmer champions or kind of innovationpartners. I don't know exactly what we want to call them, butthey're people who are like amenable a collaboration

[00:36:17] , everybody only has so much time.So it takes time to do these things together. So if you have like areal passion or a real interest, it's something you might morewilling to do. It helps us do it. the most good the most quickly. ,so we're kind of looking at creating this kind of collaboratorfarmer innovation partner kind of thing where we work, you know, ontheir farms, they kind of give detailed feedback.

[00:36:38] They serve as different kind ofhinge points, , to meet people in their community and really bechampions we're doing, but also like not just be our hype guys andhype girls out there, but just be like, Hey, what you're doingmakes no sense. Or like your aunt, you know, that's great that youcreated this capability.

[00:36:55] That gives me a forecast everyweek. I need it every day. Not useful to me. Things like that. Sothe frank feedback, , early adopters, but high touch earlyadopters, people who really are passionate about benefiting theirindustry and communities.

[00:37:10] Craig Macmillan:the state of the, world right now you've mentioned nations, lots ofdifferent crops, lots of, different technologies in your work andalso kind of in the future, what's happening now to move all ofthis forward and where do you see it going?

[00:37:23] Alyssa Whitcraft:not to you know, date myself, somehow I'm one of like, the more se,I don't know senior is the right word, but like I'm no longer theyoung in this world. And so I've been around long enough that Istarted remote sensing in remote sensing of agriculture before.

[00:37:39] was really on an upward trajectory.Things have changed the last 15 or 16 years. But when things werereally was the food price spikes in 2008 and 2011 that led to huge,push over a billion people into chronic food insecurity. It'shorrible. So let's launch this called GeoGLAN Geo Global Monitoringthat's going to use satellite data to give us information about,crop production globally.

[00:38:05] Some 40 odd years passed when. NASAfirst started doing it with Landsat. Within that GeoGLAMinitiative, I was program and still in program scientist one ofthem. And my specific role is I work with the different spaceagencies in the world on developing new missions foragriculture.

[00:38:20] I basically advocate for theagriculture community to make sure we get the observations we needto do our analyses. what started out is very much this like foodsecurity, markets and trade kind of stuff. Segwayed over time, asthe field grew, changed, ag tech blossoming, whatever it mightbe.

[00:38:38] And around 2019 2020 was when myspecific focus started turning a little bit more, not stuff, butstarted zeroing in on the kind of farm level stuff. Because I gotreally interested in the way my discipline, my methods, my toolsincreasingly being used in the sort of sustainable ecosystemservices marketplace.

[00:39:01] Without there being a whole lot ofkind of methods, development, calibration, validation, like, yeah,we can, you know, create a map, but is it any good kind of thing?Or yeah, we can create a model, but does it work? People werecoming to us with the NASA harvest name and the NASA kind of nameand saying, can you validate this?

[00:39:17] Can you do And we all felt prettystrongly that our role was really to lift. votes for everyone.That's where we zeroed in on that topic wise in the HarvestSustainable And Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, which we callHarvestera. I'm also the executive director of that. all thesetools have advanced.

[00:39:35] The need has advanced. Theaudience's kind of openness has advanced. The kind of critical needfor us to use agriculture as a tool belt to restore ecosystemhealth, soil health in rich communities and fight climate change,it all kind of needs to start at a baseline of understanding wherewe are and where we can go.

[00:39:54] And so I see satellite big part ofthat. This is all kind of coming together now. We still need thepublic sector's investment in terms of high quality observations.access, the lifting of the science in order for that to really takeflight and be reliable and be good. that work that I've done for12, 14, something like that, 13 years now through GeoGland with thespace agencies has recently been morphing, into not just advocatingfor food security and market applications, but also saying, youguys, we got to think about ecosystem services.

[00:40:25] We have to think about sustainablemanagement. Got to think about the precision. And so the spaceagencies are now receiving this message that there's a whole newset of value propositions for their data, but also the publicsector pushing that direction.

[00:40:39] And then we like kind of pushtogether. Toward impact.

[00:40:42] Craig Macmillan:one message that you would want to tell wine growers regarding thistopic?

[00:40:46] Alyssa Whitcraft:Gosh, one message.

[00:40:48] Craig Macmillan:Two?

[00:40:51] Alyssa Whitcraft:Oh man, I guess you know, I think what a lot in my field don'tthink a lot about is quality Of the crops. We tend to think aboutquantity. Of the crops. and as a result, we can kind of answer usethe wrong, use the wrong approach, answer the wrong question. Andfor specialty crops and I think, you know, what's finer than finewine in, in terms of how much finesse you have to have from the 25plus year old vines through bottling.

[00:41:20] What kind of needs a higherattention to quality I think that. for the grape growing community,particularly for wine and fine wine. they could maybe help shapethis and push this, put out the demand there and say like, I don'tneed you to tell me how to absolutely maximize, make the likejuiciest, wateriest, highest volume of berries.

[00:41:40] Like I need to know how to make thebest quality. I need to know how to prevent losses related toextreme weather. I need to make sure I don't have my die that, I'vebeen cultivating for so long to build these beautiful old growingand all that, they're more important than maybe they realize theyare in this space and could push to really move our science andusership toward quality more than perhaps we have historically.

[00:42:03] Craig Macmillan:and I really appreciate you sharing that. This has all made methink about an interview that I did recently with an extensionistfrom Texas A& M we were chatting after the interview actually aboutclimate change. She said, there is not a single grower in the stateof Texas that is a climate denier.

[00:42:22] Everybody sees it. It is gettinghotter. And things are changing and they're going to have tochange. There's no doubt about it. And that reminds me of changesin other agro systems. over time whether it's changes in the waythe soil fertility is, or changes in rainfall, or changes indisease patterns. I think there's applications, especially in areasthat are suffering extreme stresses now, that'll apply to placesthat'll suffer extreme stresses, maybe a little bit later.

[00:42:49] So I think that's a great messagethat we can bring to These programs say, Hey, we need. And here'smaybe how can we do it? How can we benefit from what you're alreadydoing? I think that's a great message. Where can people find outmore about you?

[00:43:01] Alyssa Whitcraft:if you want to find out more about NASA acres, you can go to org.If you want to find out more about the Harvest Sustainable andRegenerative Agriculture Initiative, that would be HarvestSara. orgbasically any program I've said today, you can just put a org atthe end and it'll work. And if you want to learn about my familywinery, it's WittcraftWinery. com And just shout out to my dad, mymom, and my brother for kind of sparking and maintaining my love ofand interest in food and wine.

[00:43:33] Craig Macmillan:Yeah, And just on a personal note your dad, Chris was a mentor ofmine. It was one of the first winemakers That I worked side by sidewith and had a huge impact on me. Especially around the idea ofquality.

[00:43:43] Alyssa Whitcraft:Okay, so not to totally digress here, Maybe it's germane to thetopic, which is I was pre med at UCLA. And I took a a geographygeneral ed course called people in Earth's ecosystems just tofulfill a gen ed requirement and fell in love. And that professorbonded. and he did a lot of remote sensing of tropical I took hisremote sensing class. We were supposed to. pick a and design it.And the picked was trying to. Compare every single metric that wecould derive from satellite data for Conti, with, with somevineyards that my dad sourced from at the time so like Bien Nacido.Obeying these different vineyards and trying like in compare, Imean, it was the polar opposite of a robust study. I was like 20and it was my first remote sensing class, but it really like cappedmy interest because trying to understand. Obviously there's theclimate pieces to some degree, there's the soil pieces, but youknow, my dad was the first or one of the first at least to do theblocks designation in wine.

[00:44:45] So he had N block and Q block andBien Nacido. And I was like, well, what was it? characteristic thatmade them sort of different? Could you come up with that in a way,not that we should quantify and sanitize everything because there'scertainly a je about these things, but like, what is it thatcreates quality, ?

[00:45:01] , and what of it is sort ofbiophysical in nature and could be measured and that kind of reallysparked the interest that shaped the rest of my career.

[00:45:09] Craig Macmillan:That's fantastic. I really want to thank you for being on thepodcast. Our guest today was Alyssa Whitcraft. She's executivedirector of NASA acres, fascinating conversation and tying togethersome pieces from previous podcasts. Yeah, just thanks for being aguest

[00:45:24] Beth Vukmanic:thank you for listening. Today's podcast was brought to you by,Baicor. A manufacturer of fertilizers, specializing in liquids forfoliar and soil applications. By course, plant nutrients are 100%environmentally friendly and organically based. Each isspecifically formulated to provide the optimum level of nutrients,plants need. Baicor's products. Are created from organic and aminoacids found naturally in plants and in the soil. They use thefinest natural materials. Blended scientifically to assure qualityand effectiveness.

[00:46:02] Make sure you check out the shownotes for links to Alyssa NASA harvest NASA acres plus sustainableWinegrowing podcast episodes 199 NASA satellites to detectgrapevine diseases from space. And 233, the gap between space andfarm ground-truthing satellite data models.

[00:46:21] If you'd like the show, do us a bigfavor by sharing it with a friend subscribing and leaving us areview. Until next time, this is a sustainable Winegrowing with thevineyard team.

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