The 2025 crop season has been a solid proving ground for the value and utility of satellite and aerial imagery in farming.
That’s because corn and soybean fields this summer appeared incredibly healthy and high-yielding from the drive-by scouting pass in the pick-up truck, but then crop scouts marched into those same fields, uncovering widespread yield variability and a high level of foliar disease pressure.
EarthDaily (formerly Geosys) says it will soon leverage a new satellite constellation to beat USDA yield forecasts by capturing daily calibrated images of crops and feeding those images through artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The news
EarthDaily says it intends to provide daily, high-quality aerial data that agronomists, grain traders and commodity brokers can use to get snapshots-in-time for farm fields, without ever having to launch a camera drone or upload thousands of images to stitch together an orthomosaic. Farmers also stand to benefit because the data will be available within many popular farm management information software systems.
The company is in the process of launching a new 10-satellite constellation that will be fully operational by the 2026 cropping season. This constellation is different from other ag-monitoring satellites orbiting the earth in that it will feature a yellow-band index among its impressive 22 spectral bands.
How is it different from other ag satellites?
“Most [ag] satellites do not have an imager to collect the yellow band,” says Nick Ohrtman, key accounts success lead, EarthDaily. “We have a yellow band imager on ours that we’re pretty excited about moving forward, because obviously yellowing is a key indicator of a lot of plant stresses.”
Ohrtman adds the company has yet to get out and ground-truth the yellow-band imagery in the field, but the potential to catch more yield-robbing agronomic issues on the front-end and alert retail agronomists before crops really take a hit is intriguing.
Intriguing, yes. But Ohrtman, a former Iowa farm kid himself who still helps with the family farm when he’s not working in Minneapolis, says it still serves as just a complement to the traditional scouting pass. Nothing will ever replace farmer and/or agronomist boots-on-the-ground, he adds.
“You can’t be in every field every day, walking crops,” Ohrtman says. “But if you are in the field, you’re probably going to know better than I am from a satellite.”
Main takeaways, per EarthDaily:
- The EarthDaily Constellation is purpose-built for broad area change detection, with 16 imagers on each bus capturing 22 spectral bands at the same time each day.
- The system will be able to deliver AI-ready data that brings speed and accuracy of insights to today’s EO analytics market.
- The full constellation will be operational in 2026, though the robustness of the data will not fully align with the crop season until then.
- Among its 22 spectral bands, the yellow band, unique to EarthDaily, is valuable for detecting early signs of crop stress.
- EarthDaily’s offering begins with data capture, which is then transformed into downstream analytics purpose-built for agriculture.
- For farmers, the technology pinpoints when and where attention is needed in the field, predicting crop health and providing actionable insight without constant boots-on-the-ground monitoring.
Your next read: Could USDA Raise Corn Yields in the Report? Is China Buying U.S. Soybeans?
