NASA Harvest & Planet Labs Join Forces To Further Monitoring Solutions

NASA Harvest and Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL) have joined forces to promote the joint Food Security and Agricultural Monitoring Solution. The service seeks to provide analyses of possible hazards to global food security and policy-grade agriculture monitoring. National governments, international organizations, NGOs, and other interested parties from all around the world will be presented with the answer. For a trial project, Planet and NASA Harvest have joined forces with the goal of enhancing global agricultural decision-making. Though the two groups have previously collaborated on a variety of impact- and science-related projects, this is their first official business partnership. The partnerships were spawned by NASA’s Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program, for which Planet has been supplying data since 2018.

NASA Harvest, the federal space agency’s Global Food Security and Agriculture Program, and Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading source of daily data and insights about Earth, today announced a partnership to support the joint Food Security and Agricultural Monitoring Solution. The service seeks to provide analyses of possible hazards to global food security and policy-grade agriculture monitoring. An assessment tool that could be crucial in foreseeing and preventing food shortages and famines will be created by combining Planet’s satellite data with other publicly available datasets and the analytics expertise of the combined NASA Harvest team. This offering will be facilitated by the Universities of Maryland and Strasbourg. 

“The world’s food security is at a moment of enormous uncertainty – triggered not only by the war in Ukraine but by many other serious challenges, especially those linked to climate,” said Andrew Zolli, Planet’s Chief Impact Officer. “From drought in Somalia to flooding in Pakistan, the combination of real-time satellite imagery and sophisticated analytics can illuminate many types of risks to our global food systems, helping us adapt agricultural practices, adjust global supply chains, and mitigate risks to poor and vulnerable communities.”

This project was initially started to monitor fields in Ukraine in 2022 in order to examine frontline agricultural activity and assess the impact of fighting on crop yield. Replicating the strategy, the work is now being scaled to conduct regional and global reviews. This is accomplished by utilizing both Planet’s commercial capabilities and the public sector’s already-existing NASA Harvest knowledge. National governments, international organizations, NGOs, and other interested parties from all around the world will have access to the solution.

Regarding the pilot project, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Program Director for NASA Harvest, said, “Planet’s data was able to help us create a field-by-field analysis of what was planted, what was harvested, and what was disrupted, which has been critical to understanding what is happening in Europe’s breadbasket, this effort plays a key role in NASA Harvest’s broader initiative to provide rapid agricultural assessments for policy support in the face of food security and market threats.” He adds “This level of understanding can greatly benefit other organizations to monitor and predict potential issues in their own regions, moving us from research to impact. It was important to both of our organizations that we make these analyses more broadly accessible in order to improve agriculture-related decision-making around the world, leveraging the unmatched high spatial and temporal resolution that Planet data offers.”

Image provided by Plent Labs PBC