First Contact: NASA Acres at Northwestern Video Transcript
Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft: I come from a viticulture family in California, and I’ve never been in a combine in my life. I’m about to.
Dr. Karen St. Germain: My name is Karen St. Germain, and I am responsible for the part of NASA that looks down at our home planet, Earth.
I’m here in Alva, Oklahoma today talking with members of the community, farmers and ranchers, but also students and university faculty to talk about ways that NASA might partner with the university and students, but also the local community to put our satellite data to work for farmers and ranchers in Oklahoma.
Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft: I’m Alyssa Whitcraft. I am the executive director of NASA Acres, which is NASA’s consortium that focuses on bringing the value of satellite data down to Earth for American agriculture.
NASA’s been working in agriculture for almost 55 years now and has built all kinds of interesting ways of understanding crop yield. What crops are being grown there, what sort of sources of stress they are. But only very recently we had the amount of data, the models, the computational systems available to us to really connect that data and those kind of informatics to the farm.
We’re in a whole new era. And so what we’re doing as a program is trying to get as much connection of our data and science into impact as we possibly can. And that means that we spend a lot of time down here with the most important folks in American agriculture, which are farmers and ranchers.
Jim Bridenstine: My name is Jim Bridenstine. I’m the CEO of Quantum Space, and previously I was the NASA administrator.
When I was at the head of NASA, we saw NASA develop a lot of new technologies and capabilities that oftentimes end up as a one-off opportunity to do science, discovery, exploration, those types of things. But in this particular case, we’re trying to apply it to real applications that improve lives here on Earth.
It’s really important for NASA to come to places like Northwestern Oklahoma State University to demonstrate a lot of the Earth science capabilities that are having an impact on agriculture.
Dr. Kent Martin: Hi, I’m Kent Martin, professor of agronomy at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, and I’ve been a professor here for about a year.
So my family has been a part of the Alva community for six generations now. My kids are the seventh generation in this area.
I’ve been back in the community since 2011. And really, one of the things that I always wanted to do, kind of a goal of mine, was to get back to Northwestern Oklahoma State University.
We are attracting students who are actually going to be in the field doing the work that we talk about in class.
And for NASA Acres and the FIAT group, one of the key things that we have to have is ground truthing and training these models.
So one of the big questions that we get asked is, how do we know that what the satellite sees or what the tool sees that’s in the atmosphere, how do we know its relevance to what happens on the earth? And the answer to that is we create that alongside farmers and alongside students that we have today, that will be farmers tomorrow.
One of the things that they said at that meeting, that that was really foundational, was we want to be on your farms, interacting with you individually, creating a tool that benefits you, and to do it for free.
After the part of the tour at Bush Seed Company, we went out to the field and we took nine NASA Earth and NASA Acres directors and scientists, and we had three combines and one tractor with a grain cart, and we took them out in the field.
We gave them the opportunity to see their satellites in action in agriculture. We let them see grain monitoring in real time, going through a combine. We let them see sensors that some of them had helped develop, controlling header height and reel speed and combine speed. Threshing, watched grain going into a bin and plant material coming out of a combine.
And these people had never experienced that in the past at all. We gave some others rides too that had experienced it that just wanted to do it again.
But nine people developing tools for agriculture that had their first experience on a moving piece of agricultural equipment happened that day. And the impact of that was tremendous. And it’s something that they won’t forget anytime soon.
Jim Bridenstine: So farming is going to be massively transformed by technology. And it’s very important that young people today start learning those techniques.
Not everybody has to be the scientist or the engineer that designs the capability, but everybody’s going to have to know how to use those tools when those capabilities are developed.
Places like Northwestern Oklahoma State University are getting young folks engaged in these activities.
Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft: If I’m going to say anything to students, it’s like, ask questions, ask questions, ask all the questions, and don’t be shy about asking bad questions. There is no bad question that’s asked in earnest. The only bad question is the one you don’t ask.