Hydro-meteorological extremes such as droughts severely impact crop yields, globally. Quantifying and managing the impact is critical for making informed decisions regarding crop management, commodity trading, and food security. This proposal aims to develop and implement an operational methodology, in partnership with a global company, Cargill, to integrate new remotely sensed near-surface soil moisture (SM) products from the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and the upcoming NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) missions. We will integrate various remote sensing products at different spatio-temporal scales and in situ observations to downscale the SM product to 1km relevant for the application in heterogeneous agricultural regions. Crop-growth models will be used to transform this near surface soil moisture to provide temporal distribution of root zone soil moisture and crop yields at 1km. The primary objectives of this feasibility study are (1) to implement a downscaling methodology to obtain near-surface soil moisture at 1km for a data-rich region in three predominantly agricultural regions in the lower La Plata Basin in South America (2) to conduct sensitivity studies and quantify errors in soil moisture for simulated data-poor scenarios (3) to obtain root zone soil moisture and crop yields at 1km through data assimilation.