Blog SatAgro

A post has been published on the Planet Pulse blog which serves as a symbolic summary of SatAgro’s first decade of operation. During this time, we have learnt a great deal about the needs of farms, ranging from small family-run operations (10+ ha) to very large industrial farms (thousands of ha). This knowledge is reflected in the SatAgro platform as it stands today. We were fortunate that, for most of our journey, we were able to count on the cooperation and support of Planet Labs, whose high-resolution data unlocks the potential to optimise production even on relatively small arable fields….

Two-way communication with machinery Agriculture 4.0 – a marriage of precision agriculture with digital technologies, has recently been discussed intensively, in particular in connection with the first edition of the funding programme in this area , targeting farms. The programme is supported from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. In this busy period, the SatAgro team associates “Agriculture 4.0” above all with the ‘two-way wireless communication’ – by now quite a famous term among Polish farmers, about which we receive hundreds of enquiries. It’s first component, ‘The first direction’, is the transmission of instructions, primarily agrochemical application maps, from the…

Crop scouting is the basis for the multitude of decisions which take into account variability in crop development across both space and time. In our case the Holy Grail are of course timely and user-friendly precision treatments, but in practice a large proportion of our users use crop scouting for other purposes, frequently surprising us with their ingenuity. SatAgro Explorer was historically the first module of the SatAgro platform, which reflects our long-term believe that access to fresh and actionable satellite intelligence is the cornerstone of digital precision agriculture. Since 2015 the module has evolved a lot and this piece…

Late-August through mid-October is always a hectic and busy time for farmers in the Red River Valley, at the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Seasonal workers from all over the country converge onto dozens of campgrounds, while thousands of trucks criss-cross the plains along the river every day. The reason behind all this activity? The sugar beet harvest at the American Crystal Sugar Company (ACSC). SatAgro developed a satellite data-based system to help keep track of this immense operation’s progress. The ACSC is a cooperative consisting of 650 growers who altogether plant over 400 000 acres (160 000 hectares)…

The just published new version of SatAgro includes a set of functionalities that will help you to see to what extent your farm is ready for a comprehensive implementation of precision treatments, as well as what data sets are integrated with the borders of individual crop fields. The technologies available nowadays allow us to obtain a lot of information about varying conditions within the fields – their soils, crop, yielding. In response to this constant technological progress, we have developed a number of tools that allow farms to benefit from it. However, the practice of working with agronomists allows us…

For several weeks now, we have worked with a few farms to implement a prototype of a new precision irrigation module. The module is the first of a group of tools developed by SatAgro to support farms in water management. To start with, we focused on reel sprinklers, which are relatively most popular in our region. Many models allow for dose differentiation by adjusting the speed of the hose reeling ended with a cannon.

Some of our Users are currently dealing with a prolonged lack of rain, which unfortunately will have an impact on expected yields. This problem doesn’t however affect the entire field uniformly. In some cases, it may be a good idea to forgo using fertilizer on the weakest parts of the field, without neglecting the nutritional needs of the rest of the crop. SatAgro Variable Rate Application maps make achieving this easy.

The high cloudiness and delay in launching the Sentinel-2B resulted in a lower data supply than in 2016. We have taken a number of protective measures in case of repetition of such a season, including a reliable description of the cloud problems (as we write on the blog). It turns out that such a cloudy April in Poland has not been for at least 15 years, i. e. the likelihood of repetition is small. In addition, the application map data supply in 2018 will increase by at least half due to the activation of the second Sentinel-2, and perhaps other…