Article: Pixels and Potatoes ... and mint and hops and grapes; Valley farmers are using multispectral imaging to spy on their fields from 10,000 feet up

VOICES CORRESPONDENT

WAPATO - Farmers these days are into pictures.

These pictures are made up of 1.5 million red pixels, taken from 10,000 feet up with infrared equipment that's not unlike the gadgets that American U-2 planes use for spying on Iraq.

Yes, it's come to this: Farmers are spying on their crop plants.

And that, in the estimate of agronomist Don Jameson, "is a spectacular change."

Jameson has worked as a consultant for Yakima Valley growers for 30 years at Agrimanagement Inc., a Yakima firm he started buying out 17 years ago and now owns. This ongoing technology makes possible a degree of farming precision that nobody even dreamed of a generation ago, he noted.

Take this aerial ...

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