Presto: A Smarter Way to Use Satellite Data to Help Farmers

At a recent webinar hosted by the European Space Agency’s WorldCereal project, NASA Harvest’s Gabi Tseng presented alongside project partners with WorldCereal to showcase how the geospatial model Presto is transforming crop mapping. 

In addition to introducing the science behind Presto, the webinar also showed how users can apply Presto to their own public and private data to create customized crop type maps—empowering users around the world to better understand agricultural landscapes.

What Is Presto?

Presto, which stands for Pretrained Remote Sensing Transformer, is a software model that processes satellite images over time. It can learn useful information about land, weather, or crops—even in places where there’s little information collected directly in the field. What makes Presto special is how it learns. Most tools need lots of labeled examples—like knowing which locations are growing corn or wheat. That type of learning is known as supervised learning. But Presto teaches itself by spotting patterns in the raw data. That’s called self-supervised learning.

Even better, Presto is small and fast. It doesn’t need a supercomputer to work, which means it can be used in places where computing resources might be limited. It gives researchers a way to look at changes in land and crops without needing a lot of data or power.

Why Was Presto Created?

Around the world, many farmers grow food in places where there's little or no data. Without knowing what crops are planted, how the land is used, or where problems like droughts are happening, it’s hard to help those communities. Older mapping tools don’t work well if they don’t have enough data.

Presto was built to fix that. It learns from huge sets of raw satellite data and uses that knowledge to make accurate estimates about what's happening on the ground. This is especially important for NASA Harvest. With tools like Presto, NASA Harvest can support farmers, scientists, and governments in places that are often overlooked.

How Does Presto Work?

Presto works by looking at something called a “pixel time series.” A pixel is a tiny square of a satellite image; a pixel in Presto’s input corresponds to a 10 m x 10 m patch on the ground. Presto tracks how that pixel changes from month to month using data from satellites like the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 and NASA’s digital elevation models. It also adds extra details like precipitation and temperature to improve its understanding.

When it sees part of the data missing—like a cloudy day when the satellite couldn’t see—it can fill in the blanks by making smart guesses based on what it has already learned. This helps Presto make accurate maps, even in hard-to-reach areas.

WorldCereal and Presto

WorldCereal, a project funded by the European Space Agency, is using Presto to improve how we understand and map crops globally. Presto helps WorldCereal analyze satellite data over time—even in areas with little local data. To fit WorldCereal’s needs, the team fine-tuned Presto to work with their crop calendars, map different growing seasons, and create detailed crop maps. 

This lets users upload their own local data, train custom models, and generate accurate maps, helping decision-makers better support agriculture and food security efforts worldwide. The integration of Presto into WorldCereal's framework allows for more efficient and accurate crop mapping, particularly in regions with limited ground truth data.

A New Chapter for Agriculture and Earth Observation

Presto is a powerful new tool that’s helping make farming more visible, smarter, and fairer—especially in places that are often left out. By showing what crops are growing and where, Presto supports better decisions from farmers to scientists to governments, helping prevent hunger and protect the environment. 

It’s not just software—it’s a smart, flexible tool made to tackle real problems in farming around the world.

From responding to inclement weather and food supply shocks to strengthening communities, Presto is advancing how we monitor and manage land, making a meaningful impact on food systems around the world.

You can watch the webinar in its entirety here.

Learn more about Presto here.