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Expert's evidence sought for Parliamentary inquiry into impact of space technology

Posted 25 June

The impact of space technology on agriculture has been explained to a Parliamentary committee by a Senior Data Science Lecturer at Harper Adams University. 

The House of Lords’ UK Engagement with Space Committee was brought together to examine the UK's policies relating to space – and the challenges and opportunities that it can present the country.

 The Commitee is set to publish a report on its findings ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½Ò•îl and has been taking evidence from experts across sectors such as shipping, aerospace, and agriculture – and invited Dr Joseph Mhango, Senior Lecturer in Applied Data Science at Harper Adams University to explain more about how space technology is helping transform farming. 

He told Committee members: “Satellite technology is pretty much becoming ubiquitous in agriculture. We use it all the time, especially in the three main areas of satellite communication, navigation, as well as earth observation.” 

Dr Mhango explained how satellite imagery can be used to collect data on crop health through vegetation indices and general growth data for informing crop models – offering richer data than that which could be collected by agronomists on the ground alone and doing so in an automated manner – as well as to help farmers accurately assess and map field boundaries that underpin precision agriculture applications. 

On communication, he explained that direct-to-device satellite-based internet services were being used by many farmers who would otherwise be facing issues with rural connectivity. 

He added: “This is not just for home use: the main driver of this, if I may say, is actually agriculture as well. 

“There are a lot of IOT – Internet of Things - devices now deployed people are tracking methane emissions in broiler sheds, they are tracking soil moisture in order to inform the irrigation scheduling – there are a lot of uses.  

“People use - real-time kinematic positioning - on their drones: often they don’t have an RTK base station and therefore they want it to always be connected - to an NTRIP service (remote base station service) - via wi-fi. All of these connectivity needs are not met because of the satellite connectivity problem – so there’s a lot of use of satellite internet for that.” 

Answering a question about how technology could impact various sectors – including agriculture – and how he expected costs and accuracy systems to improve as they develop, Dr Mhango added: “I can imagine, ten years from now, I will be able to appraise my rented land before I put in potatoes by crunching through the previous ten years of satellite data wherever there was a potato growing in that field, running a crop model, and seeing how potatoes perform in that field. 

“All of these are sort of at the dream stage right now, and when we look forward that’s where we would like space technology to go – so lots of potential, and we’re just at the beginning, in our opinion.”