By james art 
Cover crop needs
Cover crops are essential for reducing soil erosion, increasing soil fertility and improving watershed management. Therefore, cost-sharing programs have been established to incentivize farmers to plant cover crops. To receive payments, cover crops must be terminated within a narrow time window that is verified by field teams within two weeks of termination. But with 28,000 flights logged per year, these spot checks are expensive and time-consuming.
Cover crop cessation dates in 2021 determined from HLS data Source: Gao et al., 2023
The SNWG decision
The Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset provided by the Satellite Requirements Working Group (SNWG) combines data from NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) missions to achieve data delivery with a two-day temporal resolution and 30-m spatial resolution.
The high temporal resolution of HLS enabled the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and the Maryland Department of Agriculture to verify the reported termination of cover crops from space. The HLS-based app detects 94% of farmer-reported terminations. Based on farmer reports and application performance, USDA estimates that the time spent on field inspection has been reduced by at least 50%.
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