New technology will help you predict and deal with drought.
By Burt Rutherford, Beef Magazine
A while back in this blog, I discussed new satellite technology that determined the world has about 20% more cropland than previously estimated. This discovery came about courtesy of Landsat satellites that can see every piece of the globe down to 30-meter chunks. Thirty meters is roughly 100 feet—98.4 to be exact, for those of you who, like my dad, prefer precision over rounding.
That type of precision in the wrong hands can be used to do great damage to agriculture. Used for good, however, that technology can help agriculture worldwide do an even better job of producing food and fiber.
Which brings me to the subject of this blog. By next spring, researchers in the U.S. will release a drought forecast map that they hope will be accurate down to a sub-county level. That’s according to Justin Derner, a range scientist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Cheyenne, Wyo.