Putting a CAP on Climate Change

Food is life. In all its aromas and flavors, it fuels our bodies and satisfies our cravings. But there's a problem. Agriculture produces 1/4 of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, more than transportation or industry. Fertilizer and animal waste don't stay on the farm, but wash into rivers, lakes and oceans.
We need more sustainable ways to grow the food that gives us life. That's what the European Union decided to do through changes to its Common Agricultural Policy or CAP. The CAP distributes more than €50 billion each year to support farmers and keep food affordable.
In 2019, the EU added a new goal: make European agriculture climate neutral by 2035. That would mean replacing traditional practices with sustainable ones across hundreds of millions of hectares of farmland. Is that even possible?
With the help of satellite data and imagery, it is. Using public satellite data from Europe's Sentinel-2 mission, countries can capture visible changes in their farmers' fields from planting to harvesting. But in some parts of Europe, governments found it hard to analyze the complicated layouts of small farms with just the available data. So, they turned to a service from Planet, a global Earth observation company.