March 18, 2002

NASA TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER PROJECT OFFERS DRAMATIC AGRICULTURAL BENEFITS

A NASA-facilitated Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) partnership has resulted in a valuable service that may dramatically improve farming productivity and profitability.

Sibley Manufacturing Co. of Inverness, Miss. and Datastar Inc. of Picayune have teamed to use remote sensing, the observation of the Earth from a distance, to analyze crop conditions and prescribe farming applications. Their service increases cotton crop yields by 10 percent, decreases production cost, and allows crop-yield predictions, as early as eight weeks after planting, within a 10 percent margin of error.

"Analyzing crop conditions manually, something done in the past, has become unmanageable for today's large properties," said Bill Sheppard, technology counselor for the Southeast Regional Technology Transfer Center at Stennis. "In addition to reducing time and labor, the Sibley-Datastar service produces scientific results that are more accurate and more reliable than those discerned by the human eye."

The Sibley-Datastar service, made possible by a NASA-facilitated partnership, also uses NASA technology. A reflectance imaging system based on data acquisition and processing methods developed by Dr. Greg Carter and Bruce Spiering at Stennis' Earth Science Applications Directorate measures crop health by detecting chlorophyll levels, and the camera used for the collection of the data is a product of Duncan Technologies, a past SBIR participant.

"I'm very pleased to see our approach being used in such a beneficial way," said Carter. "This project is a success on many levels," said Sheppard. "The service offers remarkable economic benefits associated with farming, and the whole, ready-to-use product was researched and developed within two years. Other farming innovations have generally taken about a decade to implement."

NASA awarded the development contract to Sibley Manufacturing, a minority-owned business, and Datastar, a women-owned business, as part of the Office of Technology Transfer's mission to engage minority- and women-owned businesses in the SBIR. With NASA collaboration and technical assistance, Mississippi Delta Community College secured a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop curricula for minority community college-level students to become agricultural specialists qualified to assist farmers in applying remote sensing technology to agricultural processes.

"The Sibley-Datastar project is a good example of a successful SBIR project," said Kirk Sharp, technology transfer manager at Stennis. "By facilitating partnerships among small businesses and research institutions, utilizing multiple NASA-developed technologies, and producing a whole, market-ready product, this SBIR project has unlimited potential for economic benefit."

Four farmers are using the Sibley-Datastar service, which is available for purchase. For more information, please contact John Bailey at (228) 688-1660.

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Contacts:
Lanee Cooksey
228-688-3341

This text derived from http://www.ssc.nasa.gov/~pao/news/newsreleases/2002/MSW-02-034.txt

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