NASA Farmers

 #54 September 17:  NASA is into farming!  Well, helping farmers. As an avid wine drinker, this piece in the paper really caught my eye! It outlined how NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to help grape growers by flying over their vineyards with a spectrometer that can spot viruses long before the laborious task of testing vine by vine.  That way vineyard growers can literally “nip it in the bud” and contain and stop the virus from spreading much sooner, not only saving much of the $3 Billion that leafroll virus costs growers each year, but also saving the environment by using less chemicals needed to stop its spread.  NASA hopes to scale the project up to help other crops worldwide, and to move from airplanes to satellites which could cover larger areas more efficiently.  9/18