A potential “out-of-this-world” crop management tool is being explored by Bayer CropScience.
Stan Martin is a data scientist with Bayer’s digital farming group in North America. He says they’ve partnered with Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company.
“They’ve been developing a whole lot of sensors to tell them how best to mine the asteroids for fuel that will power sensors. And it turns out that those same sensors that they’re developing are very, very useful to agriculture when they turn those things around and point them back to Earth.”
Martin says the sensors could be used on a much smaller scale for farms. They detect many wavelengths that cannot be seen by the eye.
“And from those, we can derive interesting and useful information about crops and about things that are happening on the ground – about the composition of soils, about how wet a field is, about what might be growing in that field.”
Martin says a lot more research needs to be done but it’s well worth exploring.
“These are data sets that no one in the history of our world has had before.”
Source: brownfieldagnews.com