{"id":4210,"date":"2021-06-23T13:17:46","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T13:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/satagro.net\/?p=4210"},"modified":"2021-10-14T19:33:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-14T19:33:12","slug":"satagro-delivers-satellite-intelligence-for-the-worlds-largest-ag-commodity-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/blog\/satagro-delivers-satellite-intelligence-for-the-worlds-largest-ag-commodity-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"SatAgro Delivers Satellite Intelligence for the World\u2019s Largest Ag Commodity Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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\u2019s progress.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ACSC is a cooperative consisting of 650 growers who altogether plant over 400 000 acres (160 000 hectares) of sugar beets every year. All in all, the ACSC grows over 35% of all sugar beet acres in the United States. Why the region is so well suited to growing beets can be boiled down to three factors. \u201c10,000 years ago this area was the bottom of a glacial lake, which gives us deep, rich soils that require no irrigation. The soil is our water reservoir\u201d explains Joe Hastings, General Agronomist at the ACSC. \u201cDue to our far North latitude, we have long summer days which help increase the beet root\u2019s sugar reserves. Cold winters on the other hand benefit storage so we can process the crop longer without spoilage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starting in mid-August, growers begin harvesting small strips of their fields to satisfy the daily demand of 5 beet processing plants, while the rest of the crop remains in the ground to gain beet mass. It is early October when the harvest really picks up speed. With the approaching mid-western winter frost, a race against time begins to get the year\u2019s yield out of the ground and onto ACSC\u2019s piling sites. During the height of this harvest stage, the daily sugar beet delivery exceeds a million tons. For more harvest numbers, see the insert to this article.<\/p>\n

So how do you keep track of the largest movement of raw agricultural products in the world? \u201cCovering 400,000 acres of sugar beet production in real-time is a challenge\u201d says Joe Hastings. \u201cHaving the ability to monitor harvest progress and crop size is critical to managing our assets and resources\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Image credit: ACSC<\/p><\/div>\n

If you do not want farmers to spend more time on reporting their every move than on actually tending to their crop, satellite data can be of help. As SatAgro\u2019s Chief Development Officer Przemyslaw Zelazowski says, \u201csatellite data combine a very low cost of information acquisition with high accuracy\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is with this idea \u2013 a way of monitoring the harvest progression of the entire Red River Valley sugar beet crop at a glance – that the ACSC\u2019s Agronomy Department approached SatAgro in early 2020. The issue was particularly salient in the wake of the 2019 harvest season, when intense rain in the region prevented over 30% of the crop from being harvested.<\/p>\n

The satellite Earth Observation sector has matured to the point where the entire globe is frequently captured on imagery from public and commercial data providers. However, \u201ctraditional\u201d optical data alone would not be sufficient to accurately capture the Red River Valley harvest. As Stefan Jozefowicz, Project lead at SatAgro, says, monitoring the region using satellites poses challenges \u201csimilar to other temperate climate regions around the globe – most importantly prolonged periods of consistent cloud cover\u201d. At the crucial stage of harvest, skies over the Valley are often overcast – getting a clear view of the terrain requires some luck. In fact, most logistics challenges happen during bad weather, so often the most needed image is also the one that is hardest to get.<\/p>\n

For this reason, the system developed by SatAgro utilizes another type of satellite data: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Instead of relying on sunlight illumination and a cloud-free line of sight to image the Earth\u2019s surface, SAR satellites emit electromagnetic waves and register the backscattered reflections. In SatAgro\u2019s harvest progression system, SAR data serves as a cloud-proof backup to optical imaging.<\/p>\n

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Radar image of the Red River Valley \/ Copernicus Sentinel data 2020<\/p><\/div>\n

A combination of optical and radar satellite imagery allowed SatAgro to capture the 2020 harvest as it happened, in dynamic detail. The base output of the system are field-specific harvest maps. These are aggregated into regional percent complete values, in accordance with the ACSC\u2019s internal organization and business needs. Regional figures where then presented on charts and maps on an easy to use dashboard.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe harvest completion information SatAgro was able to generate gave us greater confidence in our crop and harvest progress predictions\u201d says the ACSC\u2019s General Agronomist. \u201cThe SatAgro team has been very open to learning our business and the unique way we look at things, the information we need, and the structure in which the data is presented\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cSatAgro\u2019s aim is to assist the ACSC by delivering accurate and timely data. We are happy to contribute our small puzzle piece to this immense operation\u201d said Stefan Jozefowicz. The ACSC harvest detection project is part of SatAgro\u2019s offer to institutional clients – large scale agroanalytics, with components ranging from precision agriculture to yield prediction.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s progress. The ACSC is a cooperative consisting of 650 growers who altogether plant over 400 000 acres (160 000 hectares)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4235,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4210"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4475,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210\/revisions\/4475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/satagro.africa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}