An Eastern Oregon potato farmer sits in his tractor and activates the on-board computer. He punches the coordinates into the computer, and a satellite picture of his field appears on the screen.

From the information provided by the satellite, the computer determines how much nitrogen, water and other chemicals should be released into the soil.

As he drives through the field, the computer tells the tractor when to release the nutrients and in what quantity.

Through this process, the farmer eliminates uniform spreading on the farm, and as a result, drastically reduces pollution and saves money by eliminating unneeded water usage.

A fairy tale? Something out of a Ray Bradbury science-fiction story? Not really. A scientist at Oregon State University thinks that scenario will be common by the year 2000.

Andy Hashimoto, professor and head of the Bioresource Engineering Department at OSU, projects that within five to ten years, farmers will regularly use satellite photos to help them on their farms.

OSU's Bioscience Department, led by Chaur-Fong Chen, assistant professor of bioresource engineering, has been working on computer-controlled irrigation systems for the past few years through the Earth Observation Commercialization Application Project (EOCAP). That was phase one of the project.

The program now enters phase two. It recently received a three-year grant from NASA to work on commercializing satellite photos to aid farmers. The grant totals S2.2 million and was given to EOCAP and Cropics.

OSU works side-by-side with Cropics, a company founded by Eastern Oregon fanner Frank Lamb. It was on Lamb’s farm that EOCAP tested and installed a computerized irrigation system. In Lamb’s system, a computer rather than a person controls the irrigation outflow.

But in phase two, the emphasis is on satellite photos. EOCAP uses satellites from the French company SPOT (Satellite Pour L'Observation De La Terre), whose satellites fly over, take pictures of the farm, and then beam the information to a ground station in Canada.

The information is processed from there to OSU in 24 to 48 hours.

Lamb says he is happy to see a huge independent agency like NASA help out a smaller one like Cropics through research like this.

“I think it’s a technology that is now just coming to practical use,” Lamb said. He agrees with Hashimoto that this technology will be common for farmers in five to 10 years.

French SPOT satellites are used instead of U.S. satellites because SPOT satellites have only a 10-meter resolution.

That means that the satellite can pick up any object on the ground bigger than 10 meters. American commercial satellites, however, currently have a 79-meter resolution, which is usually not close enough to the ground to determine the problem in the field.

The satellites use energy to determine the condition of the crop. As the electromagnetic energy from the sun illuminates the crops, Chen said, a complex interaction occurs.

The portion of energy reflected and emitted back from an object becomes the source of energy for satellite remote sensing detection.

Information about a specific object can be derived by recording and analyzing the variation of energy interaction patterns.

OSU will take the information it receives through the project and, after the second year of research, ship the information to the farmers to see if they can incorporate that information in the field.

The price of these workstations and the software needed has decreased dramatically in recent years, making them more affordable for farmers.

According to Chen, computer workstations used to cost between $100,000 and $150,000, but now they can be bought for only $15,000. A software system costs around $10,000.

OSU and Cropics are the only teams working on the commercialization of EOCAP in the United States.

’The goal is to make farming more precise,” Chen said. "You can increase the profit of the farmers, which is great, and also you can reduce the amount of pollution.”

Chen said that in 10 years, most farmers will have a workstation and will be able to process the satellite information and use it on their farms. Chen sees a few farmers owning a dish while others pay to feed off it.

"The best part (of EOCAP) is that you can link the high-tech to the farmer," he said, "This is the most exciting part.”

Because of the satellite photos, Chen can more easily show the farmer the system's value.

"People used to think farmers were not as sophisticated," Chen said, “but they are very sophisticated in the way that they operate the farm.”