The most recent NASA Harvest Emerging Technologies Workshop was held on February 25th-27th, 2020 at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, MD. The meeting was co-sponsored by NASA Harvest, the USDA, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and was held in the framework of the International GEOGLAM Program. The focus of this year's workshop was to share up-to-date results and advances in the context of operational agricultural monitoring via Earth Observations (EO) from the research community and to define gaps and challenges for the operational user community. Recognizing that significant advances in EO missions and data use are being made in the private sector, the workshop invited NASA Harvest private sector partners to share their recent developments.

The presentations and discussion were aimed at:

• identifying priority areas for operational R&D activities;
• enhancing the ‘community research agenda’;
• identifying applications that are approaching readiness levels suitable for transition to operational application;
• identifying promising new satellite missions, technologies, data initiatives and applications that would meet operational information needs;
• and discussion of ideas for future national and international collaboration towards strengthening agricultural monitoring.

The workshop hosted 78 participants, including a number of international NASA Harvest partners. Sessions focused on a wide range of topics including: agency updates and priorities, improved methods for crop status and yield, fine resolution EO data and methods, data fusion and applications, EO missions, high performance cloud computing, recent developments in soil moisture monitoring, private sector technical innovations, and new contexts for agricultural monitoring. Breakout discussion groups were focused on Cloud Computing, Public Private Partnerships, Soil Moisture and Evapotranspiration, and Crop Type and Yield Estimation, sparking interactive discussion and encouraging collaboration between partners with overlapping activities.

View the 2020 meeting agenda and partner presentations.