The Buenos Aires Grain Exchange and NASA Harvest Launch Year Four of High School Education Program

NASA Harvest has renewed our partnership with the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange (Bolsa) as we launch the fourth year of our joint high school educational program in Argentina. This initiative trains teachers and students during their last year of high school. The program focuses on the use of remote sensing tools and applications for georeferencing, crop monitoring, digitization of agricultural farms and use of high resolution images, Big Data and artificial intelligence. In this relaunch of the program, we will have new and updated lessons and are hoping to expand to more students and more teachers across the country.

Since the beginning of the program in 2021, more than 1,000 students from the provinces of Buenos Aires, Chaco, Corrientes, Córdoba, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe and Jujuy participated in this training. The program begins with classroom theory and hands on software training taught by specialists from the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange and NASA Harvest. This section of the course covers topics including the relevance of production estimates for agricultural markets and food security, the importance of Earth observation data for the study of agricultural activity and the use of new technologies to improve the accuracy of these estimates.

Students participating in Buenos Aires Grain Exchange and NASA Harvest's joint educational program.

As a final project, students exercise their newly acquired skills as the course transitions to a field work experience. They assist the Bolsa's agricultural estimates team, surveying ground truth data in their field sites and monitoring the evolution of crop conditions. Subsequently, they then use different GIS tools to analyze the collected data and create machine learning-generated crop condition maps.

The data collection and analysis supports the Bolsa’s effort to have better agricultural estimates on a weekly basis, and it’s aligned with NASA Harvests mission of enabling and advancing the adoption of satellite Earth observations by public and private organizations to benefit food security and agriculture. 

The educational aspect of this program is key to increase the awareness of the use of remote sensing for agriculture, focusing on the younger generations of scientists and agricultural experts and better preparing them for job placement in digital agriculture topics. For teachers, it also gives them the opportunity to stay up to date with current digital agriculture topics of Remote Sensing and Earth Observations and to be part of the Grain Exchange's network of informants.

Registration is open for the 2024 edition, which begins on April 9. For more information about the program, go to www.bccapacitacion.com.ar or write to us at capacion@bc.org.ar.