Sustainable practices for food security.
Precision Agriculture
In 2020, the United Nations estimated that more than 2.3 billion people (or 30% of the global population) lacked year-round access to adequate food. While this worsening of world hunger was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the outlook for the future is more dire with the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security.
Climate change can increasingly put pressure on food production and access in vulnerable regions, but developed countries are not exempt. And if humanity exceeds the 1.5-degree Celsius milepost, about 8% of the world’s farmland would become unsuitable for agriculture.
Delivering a complete view of every acre and field — from planting to harvest — provides timely insights to yield a sustainable crop supply.
Transforming agriculture and crop yield is essential to achieving food security. To that end, Jacobs is developing some of the highest-grade multispectral imagery in the industry to support an increase in crop production and improve environmental stewardship.
Saving resources, improving farming efficiency
Our GeoPod system is being deployed in Indiana and Illinois to begin another season of digital aerial mapping in support of our precision agriculture partner, IntelinAir, Inc. By analyzing the 8.4 million acres of multispectral imagery we produce almost weekly, IntelinAir can determine various crop features during the growing cycle. These analytical outputs are immediately used by farmers and their crop consultants and agricultural retailers to adjust their use of water, fertilizer and pesticides to optimize a healthy yield. This minimization of resource use is in stark contrast to past practices when the only prudent course of action for farmers was to use too much of these inputs. This led to fertilizer and pesticide run-off into watersheds, along with overuse of water. Now, with precision agriculture, farmers have the technology to enhance their environmental practices.
In addition to improving farming efficiency and reducing environmental impacts, IntelinAir has indicated that GeoPod imagery will soon be used to address the increasing demand for carbon sequestration measurement and verification. Jacobs will coordinate additional flights in the upcoming farming seasons to validate the farmers’ tilling and ground cover practices, which can then translate directly into carbon credits.
Reducing carbon wherever we can
One of the acknowledged tradeoffs for this methodology is that using remote sensing aircraft does add carbon to the atmosphere, despite the fact that it's often less carbon-intensive than the ground-based techniques it replaces. Jacobs is actively pursuing ways to reduce its carbon and other emissions. Our GeoPod sensors allow the use of more efficient aircraft for large scale aerial surveying, which means that our aircraft use approximately 40% less fuel. We plan to migrate our operations to lead-free fuel beginning in 2023, becoming the first major aerial survey player to do so. And we have plans to modernize the fleet in the next several years, including aircraft that achieve another 60% improvement in fuel economy while achieving a 90% reduction in overall emissions.
Agriculture has a critical and vital role to play in climate change adaptation. But avoiding the worst-case scenarios requires harnessing innovation and limiting global warming to the 1.5°C goal. ■
