Pathways to a New Agricultural Revolution: NASA Harvest Exploring New Models for Public Private Partnerships in Earth Observations for Agriculture

For close to 50 years, NASA and other space agencies have been investing in Earth observing instruments and methodologies to exploit them for agricultural assessment and early warning. Farmers can use these data to better manage lands, grow more food, and adopt conservation management practices, while others across the agricultural value chain can utilize these data to promote traceability, to verify supply chains, to support actuarial decisions, to manage logistics, and to make trade decisions.

In that time, many of the partnerships have focused on a unidirectional transition of methodologies from public research to private sector, limiting the knowledge sharing between sectors and arguably slowing progress toward the revolution in agriculture and food systems needed to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and other critical milestones.

NASA Harvest - NASA Applied Sciences' new food security and agriculture program - envisions new models of public private partnerships for Earth observations for agriculture wherein private sector knowledge is given equal bearing at the table from the inception of collaborations and wherein sustainable business models are core to all cross-sectoral collaborations. In this talk, we will highlight successful examples of collaborations with industry established thus far under Harvest and identify common challenges to successful partnership while providing our lessons learned on how to overcome them. We emphasize that we all have a role to play in revolutionizing the food system and addressing critical global challenges, and actively seek to engage actors who share this vision.