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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

We’ve been doing this for years. FarmLogs (YC 12) used satellite imagery to determine crop health and identify pests/disease.

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Yes, I worked on it in 1972 for Earth Resiurces Technology Satellite, ERTS, developing an image orocessing library to correct for satellite angles, Sun position and cloud cover. I bellieve that was for NRO/CIA as it was used for grain yields during the Cold War. It read multiple color bands plus IR and we could recognize corn and wheat blight. This allowed it to be used for crop yield predictions, so we knew Russian yields before they did. It was a bunch of linear array processing functions. That satellite is now called IntelSat, likely a KeyHole 10/11.

Out of curiosity, what can you do with data abour Russia's farm yields?

Probably a lot, but besides maybe predicting price changes of the crop, I can't think of much (I guess that's why I'm not a gov analyst).

In Cold War times, information from remote sensing was recognized as important to understanding the USSR grain harvest and possible instability it might cause. I'm sure interest and target lists have only increased since then.

See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_United_States–Soviet_Unio...

Or the perennial Afghanistan poppies: https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/9851

@saganus Completely unrelated but I saw you ask a question back in 2019 on how to repair a TRS-80 Model 4P. You might want to look at the YouTube channel Adrian's Digital Basement. He repaired a Model 4P about 10 months ago. Did three videos on it.

Hopefully you already figured out how to fix it though!

Awesome! thanks a lot!

Will check the videos out. I have not had the chance to repair it yet.

Cool! Glad to help, in a small way.

The Model I was my first computer. So I have a soft spot for the TRS-80 line :)

As a note. Adrian lives in the Portland, Oregon area. If that would be of any use to you.

The discussions among team members was that once the U.S. had reliable predictions of crop yields then the State Dept could respond in the grain markets. Thee were grain reserves that were available that could be used to flood the global markets resulting in lower grain prices and lower revenues for Russia. The undersanding was that "Grain is Gold", and it appears now that that is still true.

That's pretty wild. Thanks for the details

Probably concessions at the bargaining table at the intersection of arms and food.

Where before the harvest they might balk at some of the language in an agreement after they learn the harvest was going to be disappointing they may agree to certain demands and make concessions.

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