Officials from Paraguay's Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock and the Directorate of Agricultural Censuses and Statistics recently met with GEOG Professor Matthew Hansen to advance a satellite monitoring project for agricultural crops, with the goal of estimating the production of different crops.
Coordinated by the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD), the project will include sharing technical capacities for mapping and estimating cultivated areas, satellite information, artificial intelligence algorithms and probabilistic sampling. The system will allow for the consolidation of surface estimates using the generated images, enabling the observation of crop development.
The official implementation of satellite mappings is projected for 2024, with the hope that the tool will be used regularly from next year. For the 2022-23 harvest, the study estimates that soybean cultivation will reach 3.55 million hectares, with a projection of 9.84 million tons and yields of 2,773 kg/ha. Corn crops are expected to cover 1.01 million hectares, with yields of 5,178,650 tons and 5,113 kg/ha, respectively. Other crops to be analyzed include cotton, cassava, beans, sugarcane, peanuts, sunflowers, rice with irrigation, tobacco, sesame and yerba mate, among others.
This project will be vital to Paraguay's agricultural sector. By validating the data collected through the images, the country will be able to get a clearer picture of the state of its crops and make informed decisions to improve its production.
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