With the price of everything in farming going up except the price of cotton, there is an urgency to develop ways to reduce rising costs of production. Many producers believe the answer to this problem will come through some method of precision farming, but early indications of what precision farming can offer remain vague. Research is being conducted at the Stennis Space Center, as part of NASA's Commercial Remote Sensing Program (CRSP) to address this issue. Supported by CRSP, Spectral Visions is exploring ways to use remote sensing in a large-scale production mode to predict where certain cotton pests (i.e., tarnished plant bugs, Heteroptera: Miridae) would gather and feed. Once identified, these areas can be represented in a prescription map to guide spatially variable insecticide applications. Working directly with researchers from the USDA, significant patterns have been detected in the way plant bugs respond to the non-uniformity of growth across cotton fields. Using certain wavelengths, multispectral imagery can routinely detect vegetation, and by using different vegetation indices, vigorous vegetation can be distinguished from less vigorous vegetation. Plant bugs prefer to feed on tender new squares found, at least early in the season, in the more healthy regions of a field and easily detected with remote sensing. These healthy areas are then rendered into an ‘on/off' prescription map to be loaded into the controller of a GPS equipped ground sprayer. As the sprayer tracks across the field, the GPS signals its location to the controller and determines if it is in an area to be treated. The controller reacts accordingly by controlling an electronic valve that restricts or permits the insecticide flow. During the 1999 season, we achieved insecticide reductions of nearly 40%, saving money on insecticide costs and lessening the environmental impact.