Improving agricultural productivity is one of the main ways to lift people out of poverty but without accurate data it's difficult to identify the farmers who need help, scientists from Stanford University said. "But to improve agricultural productivity, we first have to measure it, and unfortunately this isn't done on most farms around the world," he said in a statement. While Earth-observing satellites have been around for more than three decades, most of their images haven't been detailed enough to show the small agricultural fields common in developing countries. "You can get lots of them up there, all capturing very small parts of the land surface at very high resolution," added Lobell, who co-authored the study. "Just combining the imagery with computer-based crop models allows us to make surprisingly accurate predictions ...," Burke said.

Source: Standard Digital February 14, 2017 07:58 UTC