Faculty, students, and staff from eight universities in the U.S. Northern Great Plains formed the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC) to lead a regional transition to sustainability. One major focus was on agriculture, an important part of the region's economy and social structure. By forming a learning community in concert with farmers and ranchers, UMAC has made information an asset as valuable as land, labor, and capital. One primary source of information combined with traditional

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... es is remotely sensed imagery. UMAC has created an end-to-end operation, starting with data acquisition by airborne and orbiting sensors customized to acquire data needed to meet producer demands, proceeding to development of value-added products, and finally making them readily accessible on the WWW to non-expert users whom we also train. A specific example of the operation in action illustrates the economic and environmental benefits that result.