Wheat field. Photo: Ian Worsley, Flickr.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Descartes Labs a grant as part of its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 program. This grant acknowledges the work Descartes Labs has done to consolidate petabytes of satellite imagery into a cloud-based platform built for analysis and scientific forecasting.

With this SBIR grant, Descartes Labs seeks to demonstrate an automated food security capability to analyze, monitor and forecast wheat crop across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Descartes Labs has trained agricultural models to generate daily U.S. crop forecasts for corn and soybeans, and now seeks to take the analysis further to better understand how food crops affect humanity on a global scale. The proposed SBIR system aims to be able to assess how weather patterns and human changes like population and migration affect crop health, and how and where crops are planted. This monitoring platform also seeks to identify and track crop contamination and disease, and provide timely alerts of food production failures so communities and leaders can react immediately.

“This work will help expand our understanding of remote sensing data and gain new insights into the availability of natural resources in the area and their impact on food supply,” said Mark Johnson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Descartes Labs.