RMSI Aids Bigger Harvests with New Agriculture Findings
NEWARK CA, December 18, 2006: In the United States less than 1% of the population, or around 3 million people, claim farming as their profession. By comparison in India, an impressive 200 million persons are predominately involved in agrarian pursuits. This lends urgency to quest to apply the advantages of remote sensing, GIS and web-based information systems to farming in the world's largest democracy. RMSI Inc. recently published blueprints and methodologies needed to create a systematic and sharable database on crop-related issues.
Focusing on such crops as wheat, sorgum and rice, RMSI analysts applied the unique rainfall, temperature and vegetation index characters as new techniques for monitoring and predicting crop vigor. The resulting white paper and related findings have application in a wide variety of sectors such as crop insurance, proper distribution of available fertilizer by fertilizer companies, determining minimally effective application of pesticides and herbicides, and site suitability archives useful to both farmers and government cadastral offices. Study results can be enhanced by the launch of the Cartosat satellite, where 2.5 meter resolution aided in mapping field boundaries.
The case study provided valuable strategies as Indian agribusiness moves closer to the ultimate goal of a complete online information system useful to farmers, traders and consumers.
In a related study, RMSI employees have worked to fill in the gaps in precision agriculture through applied research. The research results move the company closer to development of a custom solution that will for the first time use modeling to predict the specific yield and production estimation. The resulting highly sophisticated crop estimation model includes such factors as vegetation index and texture, rainfall and related climatic conditions amongst others.
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