The federal business of Planet Labs has secured a contract to provide satellite imagery products to the Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service for use in crop production assessments at the state and country level.
NASS will incorporate basemaps into its data collection and analysis workflows as the agency is seeking spatial and temporal granularities for this year's domestic farming season, Planet said Monday.
The company intends for its satellite data to help NASS analyze observations of disaster response scenarios that are hard to do with a medium-resolution optical system.
Rick Mueller, head of the spatial analysis research section at NASS, said using datasets from Planet will allow the agency to "understand and quantify trends in upcoming growing seasons, identify regions prone to drought stress and natural disasters, and provide high resolution assessments of crop production.”
“It’s encouraging to see this group integrate commercial datasets and products into their workflows, and we’re eager to see how accurate and timely Planet data contributes to their 2021 growing season assessment," said Vince Hurley, the company's federal civilian account executive.