NASA- Smelling the coffee
When the Kauai Coffee Company wanted a cheaper way to monitor the ripeness of its coffee beans, the federal government helped out.
Starting next fall, the sky over America’s largest coffee plantation will be dotted with an unmanned NASA aircraft. It’ll hover over Kauai Coffee’s Hawaiian crops, monitor the ripeness of the beans and inform executives when it’s the perfect time for the harvest.
The NASA-funded team, based at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, received a $3.76 million grant from the federal government to purchase and maintain the unmanned solar-powered aircraft. A NASA statement says the project will let Kauai Coffee “know, down to the day, the best time for harvesting the beans, bringing the best flavor to consumers.”
“This is a very futuristic approach to precision agriculture,” says Stan Herwitz, a professor of earth science at Clark University who’s heading the project.
Herwitz said the tax-funded monitoring “may also aid the state’s economy. The Hawaiian economic development office helped us get the grant…. We felt (Kauai Coffee) could improve their profit margins.”
The Kauai Coffee Company project is an example of a recent trend: Corporations increasingly are guiding the direction of NASA’s $1.5 billion Earth monitoring program. Instead of private firms paying to launch their own satellites to monitor crops and vehicles, companies have found it cheaper to send taxpayers the bill.
NASA, Hawaiian politicians, Clark University and Kauai Coffee laud the effort as a noteworthy example of a public-private partnership. But critics charge that it’s corporate welfare — and say that America’s space agency should wake up and smell the coffee.
“It is corporate welfare and something the private sector should be doing,” says David Williams, vice president of policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog organization.
“Assume, for a second, that NASA was private,” Williams says. “Do you think they would make this kind of expenditure? We’re not saying NASA should be private, but they should look at the way things are done.”
Kauai Coffee declined to make a company official available for comment.
Smaller Hawaiian coffee companies that aren’t as politically connected as Kauai Coffee missed out on the multimillion-dollar largesse.
“If we were a little bigger maybe we could have gotten that imaging program,” says Ruby Kawai, a spokeswoman for rival grower Coffees of Hawaii. “That’s good technology and maybe, if it works out good, maybe they can expand it so that our smaller company can benefit.”
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