Small farms grow much of the world’s food, but from space they are nearly invisible. Their fields are tiny and ill-defined, and the satellite tools built to track crops were designed for the large, uniform fields of industrial agriculture, not the sub-hectare plots that feed many of the world’s poorest people.
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Small farms grow much of the world’s food, but from space they are nearly invisible.
No they aren’t.
not the sub-hectare plots that feed many of the world’s poorest people.
We can find single trees in modern satellite imagery.
What indigenous and low income land holders and producers need, isn’t western scientists helicoptering in to an environment and community they know almost nothing about, dictating maxims as if they know their ass from a hole in the ground. Decades of satellite data have produced almost no meaningful insights for western agriculture that they didn’t already know through yield and fertilization records. The fuck is it going to do for a half acre farm?
What these communities genuinely need is to have the boot removed from their neck. To have access to civil services like banking, seed and stock resources, to markets. Locally trained scientific expertise who understands this particular areas issues as they relate to climate, weather, culture, and farming practices.
