ISRO satellite predicts wheat production

A woman harvests wheat in the fields in the suburbs of Lucknow. |Photo source: Sandeep Saxena

In a study using its satellites, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) estimated that as of March 31, 2025, the total wheat production from eight major wheat-growing states was 122.724 million tons.

According to the Space Agency, a comprehensive remote sensing observation on crop progress (crops) developed by ISRO’s National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), a semi-automated and scalable framework that provides near-real-time real-time monitoring of crop seeding and harvest throughout India’s rabies season.

Using this approach, using optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing datasets from EOS-04 (RISAT-1A), EOS-06 (EOSSAT-3) (OceanSat-3), systematically assessed wheat seeding areas in Indian states and overall crop status throughout India states, ISRO said.

It said that during the rabies season of 2024-25, progress in wheat crop sowing is being monitored.

The eight major wheat-growing countries are Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra.

It added that as of March 31, the spatial distribution of wheat crops nationwide was 33.08 million hectares.

It added: “By March 31, the wheat seeding area sent from satellite data was 33.08 million hectares, which is close to statistics generated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (324.38 billion hectares) (February 4, 2025).

ISRO said that the experimental evaluation of wheat production at a national scale is through absorption of satellite-derived parameters such as crop area, seeding date information and seasonal crop conditions, which are process-based crop growth simulation models with a spatial resolution of 5km × 5km.

“Multi-source data integration is expected to improve the accuracy of production estimates at a better spatial level, supporting accurate and scalable estimates of wheat yields. As of March 31, the total wheat yield in India’s eight major wheat-growing states was estimated to be 122.724 million tons,” Isro said.