YORK – Our host Philip Berman sits down with Claudia Kersten, managing director of the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) to discuss a cotton monitoring project which is literally out of this world.
GOTS is working alongside the European Space Agency (ESA) and artificial intelligence specialist Marple to monitor Indian organic cotton crops from space – using AI and satellite imagery to verify farming techniques and identify fraud.
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“Until now, neither space technology nor machine learning have been developed for this purpose. This is a revolution and it’s a complete game changer for the organic production of cotton,” says Kersten.
The project came about after Marple won a tender to conduct a feasibility study on the use of satellite data to analyse cotton fields in Uzbekistan and made an interesting discovery.
“They found that some cotton fields just behaved differently to other cotton fields, in the sense of data delivery. And then they found that these were the organic cotton fields,” she explained.
GOTS became involved when Marple presented their results to the ESA and were asked to find a partner to demonstrate whether these findings could be transferred to other parts of the world.
“India was the start,” says Kersten, with GOTS quickly realising the potential of the technology to be a “complete game changer” if it proved capable of using satellite imagery to determine whether or not cotton fields were genuinely organic.
As frequently reported on Ecotextile News, fraud in the organic cotton industry has been a serious problem for years. So GOTS jumped at the chance to become a partner in the project.
Kersten continues to explain to Berman how the technology works and how GOTS visited 6,000 cotton fields in five different Indian states to gather the data needed to train the AI algorithm to detect whether cotton was organic or not.
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