Breaking the Information Bottlenecks in Retail Plant Sales

Development of an advanced, innovative system in support of timely assessments of emerging market opportunities for U.S. commodity crops is proposed. GDA will prototype a set of automated, decision support algorithms for near-real time, analytical assessment of large volumes of satellite derived time-series data on crop conditions. For development, the project will collaborate with the Production Estimates and Crop Assessment Division (PECAD) of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS). The algorithms will allow PECAD to move from mainly visual, qualitative assessment of time-series data to automated, quantitative processing of the data within FAS operational settings and to greatly improve FAS marketing and trade assessments. The project will utilize current near-real time and historical publicly available NASA MODIS data from the Global Agriculture Monitoring Project (GLAM), a joint project between NASA, USDA FAS, and the University of Maryland. These data will be used to monitor crop conditions, compare given year conditions with those of the previous years, and to forecast relative crop yield on a bi-monthly basis. The proposed approach will be validated on the U.S.A. pilot sites against USDA NASS Agricultural Statistics and on international pilot sites against agricultural statistics from FAS. The overall results of the project will enhance regional and global agricultural monitoring and improve the timeliness and accuracy of current and projected crop commodity information relative to temporal marketing opportunities. The capabilities developed under this effort will enhance the ability of US agro-businesses to rapidly respond to, and capitalize, on new market opportunities both nationally and globally.