NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) data centers news-Foot and plow

In the spring of 2010, de Beurs and her colleagues were on a road trip of sorts through the Russian countryside, taking copious notes and photographs, and interviewing farmers and officials in farming regions around the country. De Beurs, a geographer at the University of Oklahoma, had come there to study how agriculture is changing. “We know that agriculture in Russia declined in the early 1990s,” she said, “but what is happening now?” While the fields in Samara remained productive, many of the fields the team visited in other regions had been abandoned, reclaimed by forests or overtaken by weeds. Just how much land had been left behind? De Beurs said, “It’s important for us to understand what is going on in these areas because we want to know how it is going to change in the future.” Russia supplies food not only for its own 140 million inhabitants, but also for the rest of the world.