Counting Crops During COVID

The Earth Science Division is using information from NASA’s Earth-observing satellites, surface sensors, and computer-based datasets to study the environmental, economic and societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and to determine whether environmental factors influence the spread of the virus.

The newest group of projects includes six that are looking to satellite images to help reveal how COVID-19 lockdown measures are impacting food security, fire ecology, urban surface heat, clouds and warming, air pollution and precipitation, and water quality and aquatic ecosystems.

NASA’s Earth Science Division manages these projects that find new ways to use Earth observing data to better understand regional-to-global environmental, economic, and societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Counting crops during COVID is one project among them that helps to reveal how COVID-19 lockdown measures are impacting the food security.

This year was looking to be a relatively normal year for crops until the pandemic and associated lockdown policies happened. Social distancing and living under a lockdown appear to be the only effective ways of dealing with the pandemic. In the short run, we will likely witness a breakdown of supply chains of agricultural produce with no facilities for transportation of produce. This is likely to hurt those engaged in the production of fruits and vegetables, which are perishable goods and cannot be stored. Reduced air and ground travel caused the demand for ethanol to plummet, which caused corn prices to decline. Lockdown policies also made it harder for officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to travel to farms and collect information about crop planting, progress, and conditions.