In the early days of the crisis, food security specialists questioned if Ukrainian farmers would be able to harvest the wheat and barley they had planted the previous fall. The NASA Harvest group determined that farmers harvested 26.6 million tons of wheat in 2022, numerous million tons greater than expected in leading projections. The detailed image above shows unharvested wheat around the villages of Lepetykha and Fedorivka compared to gathered wheat around Velyka Oleksandrivka. Subsiding global need for wheat and increased products assisted support global wheat rates over the summer season, discussed NASA Harvest advisor and Institute for Food Policy Research senior research study fellow Joseph Glauber. The NASA Harvest Ukraine analysis was produced by I. Becker-Reshef, J. Wagner, S. Nair, Y. Sadeh, S. Baber, M. Hosseini, S. Khabbazan, B. Barker, E. Duncan, F. Li, B. Munshell, M. Humber, R. Sahajpal, N. Kalecinski, and S. Skakun at the University of Maryland and the University of Strasbourg based on PlanetScope information from Planet and Copernicus Sentinel information.
The NASA Harvest group computed that farmers gathered 26.6 million lots of wheat in 2022, a number of million tons higher than expected in leading projections. “Thats below the previous years record harvest of 33 million tons, but its close to the five-year average of 27.9 million heaps,” Becker-Reshef included. Ukraine does not have access to 22 percent of that wheat in the eastern part of the nation due to the war..
The map at the top of the page, based on NASA Harvest information, reveals the distribution of unharvested wheat in late August 2022. Data showing the area of the cutting edge originates from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institutes Critical Threats Project.
July 12– 26, 2022.
” The dangers on the ground throughout the war have made the NASA Harvest keeping track of system one of the only safe and dependable methods for researchers to track what is happening to crops in Ukraine,” said Sergii Skakun, a NASA Harvest and Land-Cover and Land-Use Change researcher who invested multiple years at Ukraines Space Research Institute. The system combines satellite observations and modeling to assess the planting, development, and harvest of key commodity crops. Data come from the commercial satellite company Planet, NASA, and the European Space Agency. NASA researchers have been working together for more than a years with coworkers from the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine, the University of Maryland, the University of Strasbourg, the Group in the world Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM), ESA World Cereals, National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute,” and numerous other companies.
Ukrainian authorities also monitored the harvest from the ground to the degree possible. “The actual information we are slowly getting directly from the fields in the territories controlled by Ukraine are extremely close to the quotes obtained in cooperation with NASA,” said Denys Palamarchuk of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine.
At the start of Russias full-scale intrusion in February, some experts warned that 20 to 30 percent of Ukraines winter crops may not be collected at the end of the summer. NASA Harvests analysis suggests that 94 percent of the winter crop was gathered, consisting of 88 percent of winter season crops in locations not controlled by Ukraine, according to Abdolreza Abbassian, a NASA Harvest partner and former secretary to the G-20 Agricultural Market Information System ( AMIS).
Due to a United Nations-brokered trade effort that alleviated clogs at a couple of Black Sea ports, a few of that Ukrainian grain made its way into international markets. About 5.4 million lots of wheat has been delivered from Ukraine because the start of the war, according to data published by the Ukraine Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food in November 2022.
Russia will likely reap the advantage of a considerable portion of the close to 27-million-ton wheat crop, said Skakun. The analysis revealed that 5.8 million lots of wheat was harvested from locations that were not under Ukrainian control. That represents a loss of a minimum of $1 billion, Abbassian kept in mind.
In the natural-color mosaic above, based on images from Planet, unharvested wheat fields (dark brown) stand out compared to the collected (light brown) fields to the north and south. The lighter brown color is an indication of remaining plant particles covering the fields after gathering equipment has actually sheared the wheat and separated the valuable parts.
July 16, 2022. (Click image for broader, high-resolution view.).
The in-depth image above shows unharvested wheat around the towns of Lepetykha and Fedorivka compared to collected wheat around Velyka Oleksandrivka. The natural-color image was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. OLI views fields at 30 meters per pixel, suggesting each pixel represents a location about the size of a baseball infield.
Planet, a commercial satellite business that has a contract to provide information to NASA, delivered images with 3 meter-per-pixel resolution, offering a lot more detail. “Whether blunting the sharpest effects of authentic lacks, or helping everybody see the reality of improved production, much better info can assist us decrease human suffering,” stated Andrew Zolli, Planets primary effect officer.
Slowing international need for wheat and increased products helped stabilize worldwide wheat prices over the summer, explained NASA Harvest advisor and Institute for Food Policy Research senior research study fellow Joseph Glauber. “But this does not imply the food crisis is over,” he said. “International food costs stay high by historical standards, markets stay tight, and high price volatility continues– especially for wheat.”.
” Satellite information allows us to provide rapid agricultural assessments that are vital for markets and food security,” Becker-Reshef said. “Knowing the actual level of production in Ukraine adds to reduced uncertainty and rate volatility in grocery store. This is a growing focus for the Harvest group, and were dealing with developing and introducing a new agricultural quick response center that will focus on that.”.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, utilizing information courtesy of Inbal Becker-Reshef, Josef Wagner, Shabarinath Nair, and Yuval Sadeh (NASA Harvest/University of Maryland/University of Strasbourg), PlanetScope information from Planet, and Landsat information from the U.S. Geological Survey. The NASA Harvest Ukraine analysis was produced by I. Becker-Reshef, J. Wagner, S. Nair, Y. Sadeh, S. Baber, M. Hosseini, S. Khabbazan, B. Barker, E. Duncan, F. Li, B. Munshell, M. Humber, R. Sahajpal, N. Kalecinski, and S. Skakun at the University of Maryland and the University of Strasbourg based on PlanetScope information from Planet and Copernicus Sentinel data. Institute for the Study of War and AEIs Critical Threats Project offered the battle zone borders and the ESA WorldCereal job provided cropland bounds for 2021. Story by Mary Mitkish and Adam Voiland.
A Barren Boundary: Despite a largely effective harvest overall, some crops along the cutting edge went unharvested.
A satellite-based analysis suggests that almost 27 million heaps of wheat were gathered from Ukraines farms this year, but the country wont reap all of the benefits.
Russias additional invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 fueled extensive concern about the impacts on the countrys farming sector. In the early days of the crisis, food security specialists wondered if Ukrainian farmers would have the ability to gather the wheat and barley they had planted the previous fall. They likewise stressed that declining grain exports from Ukraine might toss worldwide markets into chaos and trigger food lacks continents away.
” Now we are starting to get responses,” said Inbal Becker-Reshef, director of the NASA Harvest program. “Our satellite-based production numbers for the 2022 winter season wheat crop in Ukraine make clear that farmers had a mainly successful harvest.”
