Asia Pacific’s Mid-Autumn Festival: Thousands Old Tradition Reimagined With Planet Satellite Data

As one of the world’s largest and most diverse agricultural producers, the Asia-Pacific region faces the critical challenge of ensuring long-term food security while preserving its environment and rich cultural heritage.

Tradition Meets Technology in Asia-Pacific 

The Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated in the Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan, is a major festival during the harvest season in the region. During the festivities, the people honor the moon, which is believed to be the harbinger of abundant harvests. This celebration occurs on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese lunar calendar when the moon is at its roundest and brightest. 

The rich tradition dates back 3,000 years ago when the moon’s light during mid-autumn extended the hours farmers could harvest their crops. At present, farmers face a multitude of challenges in ensuring high farm productivity such as shifting growing seasons, soil degradation, and water scarcity—all while the demand for food continues to rise. One solution to these challenges is regenerative agriculture, enhanced by satellite data. Regenerative agriculture is a sustainable farming approach that seeks to improve soil health and biodiversity, ensuring the long-term viability of agricultural lands.

Creattura, a Japanese company, blends tradition and technology to meet food demands while promoting sustainable food systems in the region. They collaborated with local communities, handling vast amounts of manual, raw data, which requires tedious processing. From the data collected, they identified that the outdated irrigation systems were consuming excessive water without necessarily improving yields. To address this, they analyzed soil moisture levels using Planet data. The localized farming insights led to the development of an automated irrigation calendar for the farmers, creating a more efficient system that conserves water and reduces carbon emissions. Creattura incentivized farmers to adopt the system by offering carbon credit funds generated from the system’s carbon emissions reduction.

In addition to optimizing irrigation systems, Planet’s solutions can also be integrated to help monitor crop health for early detection of pests and diseases, improve yield forecasting, streamline NDVI calculations, and protect biodiversity. Planet can help users gather, manage, and meaningfully visualize multiple sources of data, enabling farmers to focus on what is truly important for a fruitful season.

Given its deep connections to culture, civilization, and conservation, agriculture is crucial to building a sustainable and food-secure future. While we navigate the balance between feeding the growing population and minimizing our carbon footprint, technologies like satellite data and machine learning will be key to threading this needle. However, we must act now and collaboratively to achieve a greater impact. After all, without a healthy planet, we may no longer be able to celebrate festivals as our ancestors once did.Learn more about “Cultivating a Regenerative Future: Satellite Data for Food Security & Environmental Protection in Asia-Pacific” in our webinar on October 16th. We will discuss sustainable digital agriculture in detail with actionable insights from regional Planet data use cases.