We live on a water planet. But in practice, freshwater can be a finite resource. Farmers that are responsible for the food that reaches your plate 
have been fighting an increasingly uphill battle to effectively manage their freshwater usage. 

I've been farming for 31 years, and I take the business of getting what we grow to 
consumers' kitchens very seriously," said Dwane Roth, a farmer in Holcomb, Kansas. "My nephews just started farming and my biggest concern is that we're going to need to grow more with less. Over the years, I've seen hotter days with less rain. So agriculture has to figure out how to get as much per drop of water as we can. 

When there's not enough precipitation getting to fields, farmers need to irrigate their crops with outsourced water from reservoirs, canals or groundwater. And properly 
manage all of those resources requires a lot of data. 

A series of NASA missions and satellites — like Landsat, GRACE, and GPM — helps keep a close eye on soil moisture, groundwater levels, and precipitation patterns. This data is key, and helps support more effective water management practices through free and open source data products, like OpenET. 

To grow a crop of corn in a drought, it takes 90 days of pumping water from the Ogallala Aquifer at 30,000 gallons an hour. "To put that into perspective, we're 
using enough water to fill 98 Olympic sized swimming pools," said Roth. "But with NASA water management data, I go online, I can see when I'm over or under applying — and that's extremely important when you're saving 5 million 
gallons of water." 

"Water is a finite resource on Earth and our mission at NASA is to understand how it's changed in the past, observe the present and forecast the future," said Dailia Kirschbaum, NASA Earth sciences division director. 

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