The "Agcam" (Agricultural Camera) rode the Space Shuttle to the International Space Station on November 14. The Agcam will be observing the earth from about 250 miles above the surface. The Agcam has been in development since 2001 at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks and should be operational by this coming May.

In the past, satellites such as Landsat provided images showing differences in vegetative vigor on the earth's surface. While these images have been very useful for Precision Agriculture for the past 20 years, the Landsat satellite only provided images every 16 days for each part of the world. Issues such as cloud cover caused Landsat images to be unusable and another image was not available for 16 more days. With Agcam being mounted on the Space Station, there should be opportunities for many images per week and in some cases more than one image each day. One cloudy day will not be a big deal with Agcam.

The Agcam has many implications for agriculture in the Midwest. The first use of Agcam will be to get detailed pictures of North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Consultants and agronomists have been using satellite images for many years as part of their precision Ag programs. Satellite images of vegetative vigor are an important layer of information used to break fields into management zones for soil testing.