KENTUCKY AGRICULTURAL AREA FROM THE IKONOS SATELLITE

When Google presented for the first time this kind of images in its web, the world was astonished. Although all the people dedicated to the satellite remote sensing already knew satellites such as Ikonos and Quickbird, were through Google that the people in general could appreciate the reach of this new technology. In this spectacular subscene of an image caught by the Ikonos satellite (1mt resolution per pixel), we observed with high quality many details that would escape at sight of a Landsat satellite of 30mts of resolution. This subscene corresponds to an agricultural area of the Fayette County, near the city of Lexington, Kentucky. This is a zone basically dedicated to the culture of tobacco and corn. The variety of tobacco that is cultivated in this zone is burley tobacco and has a very interesting characteristic from the agronómico point of view. Whereas the tobacco of type Virginia (or flue cured) is harvested leaf by leaf during the course of the season and later cured in stoves, the burley tobacco is let it mature in the field to be harvested "the whole plant" and later cured in sheds (air cured). In this Ikonos image we can appreciate the tobacco burley in its different stages from maturation. While some of the parcels still maintain their greeness (approximately to the center of the image) other already is reaching the necessary point of maturation (yellowed) after their harvest (left down). In this last parcel we can appreciate a small brown horseshoe shape that corresponds to a zone affected by the disease "black shank", that usually affects some tobacco cultures. The parcel of bluish green color that extends in diagonal from the center towards the right bottom part of the image corresponds to a corn culture. Another detail that can be distinguished here, is the fact that several of these parcels are associate with sheds that are appraised clearly. These constructions are the sheds destined to burley tobacco curing. This is a composition of bands 3.2.1 (natural color) of the Ikonos satellite. It's importante remark that this satellite has in addition a spectral channel in the near infrared.