Driving Profitable, Sustainable Farming Satellite Imagery
Frequent, high-resolution images capture essential information about crops, allowing growers to make informed decisions.
Like the rest of the world, the agriculture industry is being transformed by technology. Digital agriculture promises growers increased production and savings on input cost while delivering more sustainable farming.
To help deliver on this lofty potential, Planet supplies daily, high-resolution satellite imagery to help analyze crop health and drive value for growers. We’re proud of our imagery, but we also know imagery doesn’t drive innovation alone. Some of the leading agriculture companies and organizations across the globe draw on Planet data to help their customers make more informed decisions in the field.
Driving Successful Growing Seasons with Satellite Data
Growers need to make critical decisions at various points throughout the season in order to maximize results and profitability. Some of these decisions happen before planting by reviewing past performance to optimize inputs, and some are made in response to unanticipated weather variations, like a dry or wet spring, both of which can lead to pest infestations and disease outbreaks. By using satellite data, growers can analyze crop health from the past to plan ahead and to make timely decisions about treating problems as they crop up. Agronomists and crop consultants benefit too, keeping up with the progress of their customers’ fields remotely.
Where should I Delineate Management Zones?
Vegetation indices calculated from near-daily PlanetScope imagery show where crop productivity is highest and lowest, and establish baselines for in-field variation. Dense, year-over-year satellite data can also highlight topography and soil properties over broad areas, enabling growers to direct resources across vast field areas with greater reliability.
Accurate crop productivity data begets better definition of management zones and specific crop-yield forecasting. PlanetScope data can be used to understand cover crop biomass, producing accurate management zones to help growers test soil, optimize inputs (such as water, fertilizer, herbicides, etc.), save costs, and avoid overapplication.
Annual productivity measured by satellite data can reveal historical in-field variations to help identify high output areas, predict yield potential, and generate variable rate prescriptions.
Scout with speed and efficiency.
In the past, it was common for growers, their employees, and the companies that serve them to spend hours surveying entire fields to locate and identify crop issues. Thanks to the spatial resolution and frequency of modern satellite imaging, however, those lengthy and costly scouting trips are made more efficient with directed scouting. Farmers use satellite imaging to create detailed maps that quickly and accurately pinpoint affected areas of their crops. By analyzing information about crop health, farmers can identify areas of their fields where crops are stressed. Plus, the digital tools that employ Planet satellite data often include tools that help communicate to employees on handheld devices, easily guiding attention to crops that need to be treated.
Planet satellite monitoring identifies field-level changes in crop vegetation across the growing season. Growers and the companies that serve them can track in-field variation with daily cadence to inform decisions.
Receive alerts about crop changes before they become bigger problems.
With even more data from satellite imagery, those same tools can also offer automatic detection of issues without the need for human analysis. Algorithms that detect rapid declines in crop health can be used to generate vitality alerts and even email and text notifications that tip off growers to areas that may be affected by pests, nutrient deficiencies, or water stress before they become serious problems. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and by noticing issues before they become serious threats, farmers can save significant labor costs and preserve threatened yields.
Target treatment for every growth stage.
Need to know when and where to water and fertilize? These in-season crop management tasks shouldn’t rely on growers’ intuition alone. Comprehensive overviews of their fields can be used to generate prescription maps to automate the application of inputs onto the field. But where this data isn’t historically available, in-season satellite images can be used to generate variable rate applications of nutrients and crop protection products. Likewise, timely satellite data can be used to understand the growth stage of crops, crucial for the appropriate timing of some products. The imagery that informs these targeted treatments can also serve as reference later in the season, when growers need to gauge how their treatments affected crop production.
From the early days of Landsat to present-day commercial providers, agriculture has been one of the largest adopters of satellite imagery. By partnering with leading agricultural companies over the years, we’ve gained a window into the day-to-day challenges, concerns, and opportunities that growers have across the globe.
Planet’s vision is to deliver precise and reliable field-level crop information to help agriculture companies and their growers optimize inputs, monitor crop health, and improve yield.
With Planet, you can leverage the processing power of our platform to focus your expertise on your applications versus building your own imagery processing and cloud infrastructure.
STILL WEIGHING YOUR OPTIONS?
Visit us at planet.com/ag to learn more about innovative applications of satellite imagery in agriculture, and reach out to our team at [email protected] if you have questions.