While the technology is up in space, Hydrosat is on a roll back on Earth. Hydrosat is a geospatial technology company that uses satellite based thermal imagery and its own proprietary machine learning and analytics to forecast yields across the world. Earlier this year, the company announced it’s a $20 million fundraising round and a grant from the U.S. Air Force, and then in June the company announced the acquisition of IrriWatch, a Netherlands-based irrigation software company.
This past year was the pilot year for the Crop Yield Forecast product. CEO Pieter Fossel says the company’s results were within 0.75% and 1.01% of the USDA’s final corn and soybean yields, respectively. He says the team is working toward the goal of using the insights from the imagery to help farmers increase yields by 50% and reduce electricity and water usage by more than 25%.
“We are working to provide an extremely scalable, low cost set of solutions,” Fossel says. “Everything we do is based on satellite infrared images which are indicating crop stress—and water stress in particular.”
The company currently works through agribusinesses to assess crop growth stages and make its yield calculations. Most of its work in row crops so far has been for seed production and in potatoes. The product is priced per acre for the entire season. And while the product can be used for growth and yield assessment it can also be used for in-season decisions.
“We’re continuously updating the product. It’s not a delivery of an image—we are providing access to daily insights the entire growing season,” Fossel says. “We are working to provide the best possible tools so growers can make best possible decisions.”
As an example, he shares the tool can be used at planting time by monitoring soil moisture.
Currently, the company provides its services in the U.S., Canada and Europe, but has expanded to offer its software platform globally. Their insights can be used on a field, farm, county or national level.
In early June, the company announced the acquisition of IrriWatch, a Netherlands-based irrigation management software company.
“We aren’t telling growers what to do but we are empowering them with daily data to make their own irrigation decisions,” Fossel says. “Our goal is provide the best possible information for their decision.”
IrriWatch was founded in 2019, and has customers in 62 countries. The goal with the acquisition is to further build on the ability to share water-use insights with farmers.
“We’re in an interesting time to be working on this—the pace of extreme weather events, drought brought on by climate change, they are all having a great impact on growing food,” Fossel says. “At the same time, we’ve never had more access to these analytical capabilities to mange through natural constraints to continue to increase yields.”
In 2024, Hydrosat is launching its own dedicated constellation of satellites.
“This will give us higher resolution and we’ll be less impacted by clouds,” Fossel says. “Otherwise, our images are a product of the whims of what’s publicly available from NASA and other space agencies. Currently, our biggest limiting factor in the data we use is frequency. Having more frequent data will continue to allow us to deliver high-resolution products at an affordable cost.”
Fossel says satellite-based thermal imagery is a good fit for row crops.
“Right now, 95% of the market is an opportunity because it’s too costly to provide high-res data at the frequency required by aircraft or drones,” he says. “We are working to democratize geospatial insights for farming everywhere.”
