Remote Imagery

A New Eye In The Sky: High Frequency, Multispectral Satellite Constellation Approaches 2026 Debut

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:40:17 GMT

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

Satellite imagery of a corn field in the U.S. with corresponding NDVI (plant health) and precipitation data all the way back to 2017.

(EarthDaily)

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?

EarthDaily satellite data showing the crop progress of China’s corn production regions for the last five growing seasons. The 2025 trend line (black) shows higher than historical average crop health.

(EarthDaily)

“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?

Farm Drone News: AgEagle Multispectral Sensor, GPS Satellite Launched and Rantizo Spins Off Software

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:08:05 GMT

AgEagle Aerial Systems Unveils New RedEdge-P Green Camera

(AgEagle Aerial Systems)

AgEagle Aerial Systems announces the launch of its new RedEdge-P Green, a multispectral camera designed to enable precision agriculture from planting to harvest.

AgEagle says farmers that use the new sensor payload can achieve higher yields through quicker interventions both early on and late in the crop cycle. Operators can reduce fertilizer and irrigation inputs and engage in smart harvesting techniques using optimized indices and targeted indices like the Plant Senescence Reflectance Index (PSRI).

Available as a standalone camera or in paired configurations with the original RedEdge-P and the RedEdge-P Blue, users can leverage up to 15 noise-resistant, data-rich spectral bands essential for large-area precision agriculture.

The RedEdge-P Green camera is NDAA-compliant and integrates with multiple drone platforms. Each camera kit includes a Calibrated Reflectance Panel (CRP) and a Downwelling Light Sensor (DLS2) for radiometric calibration.

Production of the RedEdge-P Green camera is underway, and the first units are expected to ship this week. For more information about the RedEdge-P Green visit ageagle.com.

Dutch Startup Launches Largest GPS Network for Drones, Tractors

(Lindsey Pound, iStock)

FreshMiners, a Netherlands-based IOT firm, launched a GPS service that enables accurate positioning for agriculture, construction and drone navigation, according to AgriMarketing.com.

AgriMarketing.com writes that the Dutch company is launching a service for extra-accurate GPS. It is intended for drone pilots, farmers and others. With this new technology, users can correct their GPS positions down to the centimeter. Real-time correction signals are sent to the user’s GPS receiver via a global network of base stations. This correction is essential for applications in agriculture, land surveying and drone navigation, among other things.

A subscription gives users access to the GEODNET network, which, with more than 19,000 base stations in over 140 countries, is now reportedly the largest RTK network in the world.

Read more at AgriMarketing.com.

Missouri Doctoral Student Says Drones Are Fine Tool for Crop Scouting

(Photo by Abbie Lankitus)

Researchers at the University of Missouri have discovered a mix of drones and AI can help farmers measure the health of their corn more efficiently.

Instead of relying on handheld devices, which are slow and impractical for larger fields, the researchers surveyed corn fields in mid-Missouri using drones equipped with special cameras to capture images and data.

After combining the drone images with soil data, the Mizzou researchers used a type of AI known as machine learning to quickly predict the chlorophyll content in the corn leaves of the entire field with great accuracy.

The study was led by Fengkai Tian (pictured above), a Mizzou doctoral student who works in the lab of Jianfeng Zhou, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.

Read more from the University of Missouri here.

Rantizo Spin-Off American Autonomy Inc. Says It Can Close the Spray Drone Data Loop

Rantizo is now connected with the John Deere Operations Center through John Deere API services.

(Rantizo)

Ground rig as-applied data has been around for decades, and it comes in handy when you’re tabulating your end of year scorecard to find out which treatments boosted yields and where a spray might have fallen short.

Yet even though spray drones treated over 10 million crop acres in 2024 alone, there’s still a gap that exists in capturing that data and integrating it into your farm management software.

Former Rantizo CEO Mariah Scott, who is now the CEO of a spinoff operation dubbed American Autonomy Inc., says her new outfit’s AcreConnect platform can help close that gap with API connections into John Deere’s Operations Center and more major FMIS platforms.

“We talk to farmers about getting that complete view of your field management, by closing the loop so you understand what’s effective or what’s not,” Scott says. “Most of the farmers we talk to use spray drones and a ground sprayer, and that (as-applied) data from the sprayer goes right into their FMIS account, but with the spray drone it doesn’t always work like that.”

The deal to divest the spray drone operations side of the business was quietly announced on Aug. 1. The Rantizo name, the startup is a pioneering spray drone service provider, still lives on, but now there’s a clean break between the spraying operations and the software on the back end that enables it.

Learn more about the Rantizo-American Autonomy Spinoff over at PRNewswire.

Your Next Read: Southern Rust Has Infected Iowa Corn in ‘Likely Every County’

Meet The Forge: Kelly Hills Unmanned Puts New Spin on Ag Tech Field Testing

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 11:53:55 GMT

Over the weekend, Kelly Hills Unmanned, a company that says it is dedicated to accelerating multimodal technologies in agriculture and autonomy, announced the launch of The Forge.

It’s being described as a deployment-centered program designed to meld best-in-class ag technologies into new tools that farmers, ranchers and service providers can trust and use for decades to come, according to a press release from the group.

The Forge’s inaugural cohort hopes to bring together a “powerhouse group” of innovators and operators from across the ag technology landscape into a coordinated, systems approach to help growers identify and overcome agronomic issues before they become yield robbers.

The cohort members, or pillars, are:

Precision AI: Developers of real-time drone-based precision spraying systems that reduce chemical inputs and deliver hyper-targeted agronomic action.
Pyka: Builders of autonomous electric aircraft designed for aerial applications, logistics and mission-critical crop operations.
ScanIt Technologies: Experts in using early detection of airborne pathogens to maximize yields and minimize costs.
Heinen Brothers Agra Services: One of the nation’s largest aerial applicators and ag services companies, offering deployment scale and deep field expertise.
Yamaha Precision Agriculture: Pioneers of robotic and aerial technology for small scale, high-efficiency farming.
Drop Flight: Providers of droplet characterization and aircraft calibration tools to optimize spray accuracy and compliance in real-world operations.
Taranis: Global leaders in ultra-high-resolution aerial scouting, delivering precise field-level insights to boost agronomic decision-making.

For more information, head to www.kellyhills.us/the-forge .

Farm Journal reached out to Lukas Koch to pick his brain about this new, novel entrant to the ag tech ecosystem. We first met Koch last year during the Kelly Hills Unmanned summer field day near Seneca, Kan., where his group unveiled the Pyka Pelican Spray drone — at the time the largest, highest-capacity ag spray drone on the market (280-liter capacity). This year Kelly Hills is integrating the Pelican 2 (300-liter capacity, up to 222 acres per hour at 60-foot swath rate) into its aerial application arsenal.

Farm Journal: Would you call this an ag tech incubator or accelerator type of program, and if not, what’s makes The Forge different?

Lukas Koch (LK): “(The Forge) is neither of those, because we’re not taking a cash influx to create an R&D program. What we’re doing is creating new tools with existing technology — if they’re part of plug and play that’s fine, but we don’t care about that. We want to know if the tech has merit and does it fit on the acre, but maybe something with it is not fully there just yet? So, what are we supposed to do with it then? You have a technology and, for example, it can take high-res pictures and identify areas of your fields that need attention, but today the most likely options are using a ground rig or hiring an airplane to manage that in a meaningful way. For that example, we think there’s an opportunity to do that with a small spray drone, but then again the logistics are tough; you have to come back and land and swap out a battery or refill the tank so often. We’re going to take a bunch of existing technologies that already exist, ask them to change nothing and put them to the test — and we’ll push the bounds of what they can do, to make these all work together in a system.”

FJ: How will this all kind of come together and take shape this summer as the program rolls out?

LK: “We have a few drone companies (in the cohort), and there’s a droplet analysis program involved — I thought that was an important piece in analyzing the spray coverage we get. Right now, we have the in-field sensors out in the field to help us ground truth the data we get from overhead. And then the remote sensing piece gives us situational awareness; it tells us where we should be focusing our efforts. And overall, I think, OK, that’s great, but now you still have to make a treatment with either a ground rig or hire an airplane.

(www.KellyHills.us)

“But with our FAA test range (pictured above) that we were approved for last summer within Kelly Hills, now we can autonomously fly to those spots with a drone, either in line of sight or Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), and we can make those treatments autonomously. This year, the tool we’re focusing on is true spot spraying BVLOS in corn and soybeans, and then next year hopefully we can make more tools or take that technology that already exists and make it into a tool for a grower, who can sign up for this subscription and buy one of these drones, and now I have a full encompassing suite of tools and I can know for sure what works and what does not work.”

FJ: How can farmers in Kansas learn more and possibly sign up to work with you guys?

LK: “There’s really two ways right now. For anything specific they might want to do, maybe there are some projects they are thinking about, go ahead and ping us on the website , and we’ll get back to you. And the other way is, once we’re done with a set tool or we wrap up our summer series of projects, we plan to make the results and findings available online, kind of like Beck’s Hybrids does with its farm applied research studies. We want people to see what we’re doing and to reach out with their ideas on how we can make better tools inside of The Forge and showcase some of these technologies together in one new product, and growers are very interested in this and would love to understand if they can package these technologies together and make an ROI.”

FJ: You already have this inaugural cohort in place, but are you already thinking about what’s next?

LK: “I have a couple companies that I need to further engage with now that they can see what The Forge is all about. A couple of those are involved in year-over-year (data) modeling technology that can say, OK, help me start to determine this is my pattern, and this is what I did last year; now can you tell me what to do next year and how to create more ROI? And then I think soil is a huge key right now, too. I don’t have any any soil type products in there, and soil sampling is great, but there are some neat companies that are focusing on soil-sensing technology that I think would be interesting to package in there, too. You know, in due time I think we’ll get there.”

Koch says the plan is to unveil many of the insights and results from The Forge at this summer’s Kelly Hills Unmanned Field Day. That event is set for Aug. 19, and you can get registered for it here.

And, just for fun, here’s a video breakdown of the Pyka Pelican 2:

Your Next Read: How To Navigate Foliar Fungicide Use in a Tight Soybean Market

Why U.S. Agriculture Needs More AI Investment to Stay Ahead in Global Crop Innovation Race

Tue, 20 May 2025 18:15:48 GMT

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key tool in accelerating the discovery, development and manufacturing of new crop protection molecules to fight yield-robbing weeds, pests, and diseases in U.S. farm fields.

The technology helps researchers shorten the discovery window and find new and novel active-ingredient molecules that are much more difficult and expensive to uncover using traditional research methods.

That was among the talking points that emerged from Tuesday’s congressional hearing on AI in farming, held in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee in Washington, D.C.

Related: The New Space Race: Why America Must Focus On AI

At the hearing, key agricultural stakeholders advocated for increasing government investment in AI technology and infrastructure. The group warned Congress that America’s status as a world leader in AI has been usurped by Japan and China, while other rival countries are also gunning for top positions.

Testifying on behalf of U.S. agriculture was Corteva Vice President of Agricultural Solutions Brian Lutz, University of Florida associate professor Chris Swale and University of Illinois assistant professor Boris Camiletti.

“AI is without a doubt one of the most profound technologies ever to be invented,” Lutz said. “We believe there is tremendous opportunity for our government to support and incentivize advanced innovation — including by leveraging the benefits of AI — to benefit American farmers. If we want to win, we need to move smarter and faster than our competition. Corteva believes with the support of our government, we will do exactly that.”

Lutz said researchers at Corteva recently used AI to model how 10,000 different molecules might be used in crop protection, all within a matter of weeks. The Corteva model was able to identify dozens of new potential crop protection molecules that its overworked chemists could not have found otherwise. He said the company is currently testing a handful of these molecules and AI will also play a role in moving the testing phase along more quickly than traditional lab-based methods.

Lutz also told Congress how Corteva scientists have deployed AI technology in its fermentation processes, which the company uses to create what he called “molecules of interest” for evaluation. Over the past few years, Corteva has used AI modeling to engineer various bacterial strains that drive fermentation reactions and optimize reaction conditions, allowing the company to run a manufacturing operation that is as efficient as possible. This application of AI helps Corteva maintain a strong U.S. manufacturing base in the Midwest, Lutz said.

“This is the new face of ag innovation,” he added. “We can accelerate discovery of new classes of crop protection products, like biologicals — nature-based solutions that help farmers grow more food by working alongside traditional crop protection products. With AI, we can begin to predict the incredible diversity of biomolecules and metabolites that are produced by microbes and other organisms, with the goal of unlocking the secrets within plant biology to develop the next generation of safe, highly targeted, nature-inspired products.”

Swale testified to AI’s role in helping researchers on his team find and develop biological-based treatments to combat Asian citrus psyllid, an invasive pest that has left the Florida citrus industry — valued at almost $10 billion just five years ago — teetering on the brink of collapse. Effective synthetic chemicals to manage the Asian citrus psyllid exist, but the regulatory hurdles to get those products onto the market are too high, he said

“We have turned to using AI to help discover chemicals of the natural world because the registration requirements are significantly lower when compared to synthetic insecticides,” Swale said.

Camiletti leads a team of researchers combining plant pathology, remote sensing and AI to help U.S. soybean farmers overcome red crown rot, a soil-borne disease first detected in Illinois soybean fields in 2018.

Illinois has been hit the hardest by the yield-robbing disease, Camiletti said, and the pathogen is spreading rapidly to Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri. The disease is difficult to detect visually, he added, and once symptoms appear it’s often too late for successful remediation.

“My team uses satellite imagery and machine learning to identify red crown rot hot spots, and we train the models with high resolution multi-spectral data to near-infrared bands and use ground observations to teach the algorithm what diseased plants look like,” Camiletti said. “This technology has real on-farm impact. We are building tools that generate prescription maps so instead of applying fungicides across entire fields farmers can target only the affected areas.”

After key witness testimony concluded, the committee opened the floor to questions from members of Congress. Watch the full hearing via the video embedded below:

Your Next Read: Decode MAHA’s Potential Effect on the Agriculture Sector

New Partnership Automates Delivery of Customized Planting Prescriptions

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 16:40:18 GMT

A new partnership between Corteva and John Deere is making planting season a more enjoyable, seamless process for some U.S. corn and soybean growers in 2025.

The companies are automating a process many row-crop growers historically jotted down in a notebook or, more recently, stored on a USB flash drive – their planting prescriptions.

The partners, who are integrating the digital and onboard capabilities of the John Deere Operations Center with the agronomic expertise and analysis of Corteva, can deliver field-by-field planting prescriptions direct to farmers’ equipment via the cloud and a wireless connection.

Andy Fabin, second from left, says he was able to improve the planting accuracy on his farm ten-fold last season because of automating his hybrid and variety placement in the field.

(Rhonda Brooks)

Andy Fabin, who participated in the partners’ 2024 pilot program and signed on again this season, says when he or an employee drives into the field boundary, the display in the tractor cab will pop up with the work plan for that field. The farmer accepts the work plan, and all the information will populate into the display and they are ready to plant.

“That’s one of the beauties of this – I don’t have to rely on the operator to know anymore exactly what hybrid is supposed to go into that field,” says Fabin, who’s based near Indiana, Pa. “That information has been preplanned and put into the computer. I don’t have to worry that, ‘whoops, I keyed in the wrong information.’ I know it’s going to be correct.”

Correct Data From The Get-Go
Good data about which hybrid or variety is going into a field sets the grower up for season-long success from the start, notes Trenton Brisby, North America agronomy innovation manager for Corteva .

“We’re able to auto-create a work plan for the grower now, something we had not been able to do before,” Brisby says. He adds that the work plans can be based on a flat seeding rate or a variable rate prescription. Either way, the goal is to place every seed where it can perform up to its maximum yield potential.
Lindsey Pollock, agronomy collaboration manager for John Deere, says information the work plan delivers helps streamline the time and effort it takes for growers to start planting. “We know they’re in a hurry, that they want to get that seed in the ground. The [technology] is reducing the time and mistakes that could happen within those work plans,” Pollock says.

That was true for Fabin, who says the work plans improved the planting accuracy on his farm ten-fold last season.
“Having the information delivered wirelessly really made a difference,” he reports. “If we had to travel 15 miles back to the office to get something and bring it back to the field, I mean, that’s hours that the planter could be sitting. And to be honest, it wasn’t going to happen. We were going to go into the field, plant and fix it later.”

A lot of farmers find themselves dealing with that same issue or a similar one during planting season, says Corbin Crownover, Pioneer sales representative.

“Every year we’ve had cases where the same seed corn hybrid could be named three different ways in the monitor, so we’d have to sort that out and get the information adjusted at the end of the year before we could do anything with the data,” Crownover recalls. “When we can make the [hybrid] numbers all accurate the way they should be, it makes things easier for all of us in the post-harvest review and analysis.”

How The Process Works
The basic process of building the work plan involves a handful of steps, according to Brisby, who outlined the steps for Farm Journal in a brief discussion.

First, the Pioneer sales representative works with the grower to develop a hybrid and variety placement plan for each field, Brisby says.

Next, the representative then connects with the John Deere Operations Center to make a work plan for each field, using either flat or variable seeding rates. Then, the grower is contacted to review the plan.

“Once they give the representative permission, the rep can then push the work plan direct to the equipment monitor,” Brisby says. “When the grower goes to the field to plant they get a pop up on their monitor screen that says, ‘You have a new work plan. Do you want to accept this?’ The grower can say ‘yes,’ and then start planting.”

The grower can also answer no, in case he needs to use a different hybrid or variety in a field. If needed, the operator can load the new seed information into the system manually.

However, Crownover says the grower’s seed sales representative can load multiple varieties and hybrids into the system, so they are included in the original work plan. This gives the farmer the ability to switch between seed products without having to go through a manual step. “We’re able to fine-tune seed selection and placement so farmers can feel more confident that their fields are going to be planted as prescribed,” Crownover says.

Technology Needed To Participate
In some cases, farmers who might want to participate in the partners’ program lack the equipment or are unable to wirelessly send and receive data.

“This is where we really believe strengthening the relationship and collaborating comes into place between Pioneer and John Deere,” Brisby says. “Working together, we can make sure the customer is able to get what they need.”

Fabin says he appreciated being able to work with Corteva and John Deere in the pilot program. “I appreciate all this technology, as a small business owner,” he says. “Capital is something we really have to manage, and these partnerships are a way for me to leverage the equipment we’ve already got. If we can reduce inputs whether seed, fertilizer or chemicals it’s good for us and is why I partner with these two companies.”

For 2025, John Deere and Corteva are expanding the pilot program to additional U.S. farmers before rolling out the program on a more widespread basis, which the companies anticipate for 2026.

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Inside InnerPlant’s Farmer-Led Investment Run and Why It’s Better Than Traditional VC

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 13:12:58 GMT

InnerPlant, a seed technology startup with a transgenic, early stress alerting seed trait in soybeans, recently raised $30 million in Series B funding. About half of the funds came from a group of farmer-investors headed by Coutts Agro. Saskatchewan grain farmer Matt Coutts is Coutts Agro’s Chief Investment Officer.

How did InnerPlant set itself apart?

Coutts’ experience with InnerPlant thus far has been unique and a refreshing departure from the typical venture capital funding cycle, he says.

The company was not the least bit shy about trekking up to Canada’s vast western plains and putting boots-on-the-ground to breath the fresh prairie air and take in his operation to gather how the two could potentially work together. And, funny enough, it all literally got off the ground by Coutts filling out one of those online “Contact Us” forms.

That’s one lesson Coutts has picked up from his relationship with InnerPlant that he wants to share with other farmers: don’t be shy about going online, filling out those forms and throwing your hat in the ring if it seems like something that would be a good fit. It might seem like a futile exercise at the time, and that nobody will respond, but you’ll never truly know until you give it a go.

“We’ve trialed so many different products and met with so many different companies,” Coutts adds. “InnerPlant has shown us a much different level of dedication to farmers, at least that I see. Shelly and her entire team were engaged right from the start, coming up to the farm and delivering the pitch right here in one of our barns. It’s hard to find companies as farmer committed as InnerPlant.”

What did InnerPlant learn from working with farmer-investors?

For InnerPlant CEO Shely Aronov, her journey with Coutts and his group cemented a strong conviction in working with farmer-led investment groups over traditional venture capital firms. She believes the shift helped accelerate InnerPlant’s journey from startup to a “real company with customer-centric values.”

“We have the retailers and growers engaged, and we have a technology that is meaningful and moves the needle. Now we must work with farmers to get the point price right, because this is not the time for expensive products,” Aronov says.

Over the last handful of months, InnerPlant has undertaken a pilot program with Illinois-based retailer Growmark FS’ Sentinel Plots to ground truth its technology. Soon you will start to notice the company launching its futuristic seeds with select farms in Illinois and Iowa as it fires up its technology and starts to “scale up”.

“We’re building a team of agronomists and crop specialists in the Midwest right now to support the rollout,” Aronov says, noting its technology remains most effective “with the help of an agronomist.”

Another thing she has learned is if you want to be successful with ag tech, you need to be on the ground and connected to your potential customers.

“We have to train the trainers, and they have to train the farmers, and in order to make that happen, we need to be there alongside them,” Aronov adds.

Why are farmers attracted to InnerPlant?

InnerPlant soybeans emit different wavelengths of light if they are stressed, hinting at possible disease pressure in the field.

(InnerPlant)

“It gets us a data layer into our crops that we don’t have today,” Coutts says. “Being able to manage stress days and weeks ahead is a game changer. If you’re reacting to plant disease you can already see, you’re too late. Of course, you’re hoping that it’s not that bad, but at that point you are probably way behind the ball.”

Coutts and his family oversee 120,000-plus acres of productive, cereal-producing cropland in Saskatchewan, Canada. The group grows lentils, canola, and wheat.

Once a farmer hits that type of acreage level, technology must return profits rather quickly to be valuable, he says. The other side of the coin is, that type of acreage also paints a big, shiny red target on your back at many technology companies. They see that acreage and the little dollar signs start dancing around in their heads before they’ve even pulled up to the farmgate.

According to Ag Funder News, the rest of the funding outside of what Coutts Agro put in came from climate investor Systemiq Capital as well as Deere and Company and Bison Ventures.

What is InnerPlant technology?

InnerPlant’s seed traits signal plant stress – the signals will be able to be picked up optically by satellites once the seeds are widely distributed. For now, the company is using stationary detection towers to scan the invisibly fluorescing plants.

To get there a transgenic gene is edited, or inserted, into the soybean plant’s genome – like inserting a new line of code into a computer program. This enables optic scanners to see what our human eyes cannot: where stress is taking hold in a farmer’s field at a plant-by-plant level.

The plant data is then correlated to areas of the field via the companies’ new CropVoice software program and can pick up stressed plants within one or two days of the initial infection, Aronov adds.

Previous InnerPlant coverage:

InnerPlant - Tech That Visualizes Plant Stress - Names Germplasm Partner

GrowMark To Pilot InnerPlant’s Fluorescent Soybeans

Plants That Talk: Coming Soon To A Field Near You

Landus’ Secret Weapon: Military Grade AI Tech Connects Farm Data Dots

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 19:15:13 GMT

Farmers and agronomists today are virtually drowning in data, but one Midwest cooperative has a new secret weapon up its sleeve.

Landus (Des Moines, Iowa) has seemingly struck digital farm data gold and, as with all things Landus of late, farmers themselves look to be the big winners here.

Landus and American invention company Tesseract Ventures have joined forces to bring military-grade, predictive data analysis straight from the high-tech battlefield of today to a new digital decision support platform for farmers and Landus agronomists. The cooperative is calling its new software offering Synthesis.

What is Synthesis?

Synthesis automates the collection and combination of data across an incredibly wide swath of sources – everything from satellites and drones to on-farm sensors, weather stations, and even disparate farm machinery brands.

The Synthesis system leverages algorithms originally designed for advanced military intelligence applications to literally synthesize all the relevant available data for a select field or operation into three different modules (Plan, Perform, and Prove) that farmers and their agronomists can use to make digital twins, or virtual simulations, of their fields.

By using these digital twins of their real-life fields, the farm management process goes from an inexact, multiple-variable guessing game to a laser-sharp predictive level. There is no more guessing, for example, what would happen to yield and the farmer’s bottom line if Farmer Joe were to put on this generic fungicide at V5. The platform is able to wormhole its way into the future, visualizing in real-time the impact of various management decisions for the farmer before any action is taken.

“It’s a radical way to reimagine information exchange and how to action it,” says John Boucard, Tesseract CEO. “We are creating and deploying 21st century human machine interfaces that can navigate the past, present, and future – today, we now can visualize the past and the present with real-time and edge data, and then envision future events and their impact before they happen.”

In developing and releasing Synthesis to the greater farm universe, Landus and Tesseract have essentially unlocked one of ag tech’s previously unsolvable quandaries: how to take all these different data layers and previously incompatible file formats, and combine them in a single platform where the farmer can have a complete 360-degree view of everything that is happening as well as everything that could happen in the field?

“Agriculture has great data,” says Matt Carstens, CEO of Landus. “But we have never been able to get it into one spot and then let the farmer analyze the data in real-time to create a digital twin that can visualize virtually any scenario. Now they can go out on the farm and be confident.”

Data visualization details

Having viewed a pilot version of Synthesis during our visit to Landus’ Innovation Connector, the platform’s data visualization capability leaps through the screen and grabs your attention. Many digital platforms lay out data in a two-dimensional, color-coded view across a field, but Synthesis has a unique three-dimensional approach to displaying different areas of the field.

Bear with me, as it’s tough to describe it here in words, but it’s a tiered, graphical representation of your real-time and future yield potential: vertically climbing spikes in green are healthy, high-performing areas of the field, while lower-lying, red colored bars show areas in the field with lower yield potential. The software doesn’t break down fields into management zones, it actually visualizes the entire field as one entity.

Farmers and their Landus agronomists can run endless scenarios through the digital twins of their various fields to benchmark management practices and what effect they will have on the crop, kind of like how a high-ranking general in the United States Military would use Tesseract technology to wargame various battlefield scenarios before finalizing a mission plan.

The digital platform today remains in development, but the partners are getting very close to releasing the first iteration, and several Landus farmers have been involved in field tests. Illinois farmer Kevin Kennedy is one of a handful that have been granted early access to the Synthesis. He is convinced Synthesis will be a seismic leap forward in farm management information system innovation.

“Having a platform that I can bring all of the different types of data sources into one centralized location, it gives me the foundation I need to use AI toolsets to build these really detailed analyses around so many different scenarios in production,” he says. “We’ve never been able to have enough of our data in one location and have it in a format that we can access and do this type of predictive analysis.”

Leveling the data playing field for farmers

Landus’ SkyScout drone-enabled scouting service is one such data platform that smoothly integrates into the Synthesis platform. Instead of having to log in and run analysis in both platforms, or export huge data sets from one platform into another, all of the data that comes from SkyScout’s flights flows automatically into a linked Synthesis dashboard. The rubber really meets the road where fresh scouting data is combined with the historic field level data that Synthesis also pulls in automatically.

“In Iowa right now a lot of the fields don’t have an average stand, so you’re probably looking at an average crop at best,” Kennedy explains. “This just allows me to have more confidence in my real-time decision-making process.”

According to Boucard, that is exactly what Tesseract set out to do when it started ideating what could happen if it placed its AI-based military wargaming technology in the hands of Midwestern farmers: provide an instant common operating picture for farmers and agronomists to use to immerse themselves in the data and make critical decisions really fast, and really accurately.

“To be able to unlock the power of that farmer-agronomist collaboration and let the farmer share that data intelligently with whomever it makes sense to share it with – the farmer should own all their own data, so we’re giving them the power now,” he says. “That will force multiply and create a market that’s truly competitive rather than dominated.”

To learn more about how Synthesis can help you harness the power of past data, current data, and future outlook data and apply an analytical approach to your farm, get in touch with Landus.

Harvesting Insights: How AI Crop Scouting Is Driving Decisions

Wed, 29 May 2024 20:42:02 GMT

Artificial intelligence (AI) remains light years away from displacing the farmer or agronomist in the agronomic decision-making process, but when it comes to crop scouting, AI is proving to be useful.

Today there are a handful of mobile-based crop monitoring programs that use AI and machine-learning algorithms to convert data sets into actionable insights — and there’s more on the way.

Last year, Ethan Noll’s team at Ag Partners Cooperative, a retailer in Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, alerted its growers to potential yield robbingsulfur deficiencies in corn. They also used weed mapping to direct spot-applied herbicide treatments based on weed type.

“AI and drone scouting has provided a level of transparency I don’t think agriculture has ever seen before,”
explains Noll, who serves as the digital ag team lead. “It just brings a higher level of trust to our conversations with the producer.”

Drone scout methodology

AgCESS, the co-op’s precision ag program, offers Taranis as part of its crop scouting services. Taranis has a network of drone operators who capture in-season, field-level data that retail partners can analyze alongside growers.

Since most AI scouting programs are only offered through the retail channel, the price per acre will often vary based on retailer. Grower sources have told Farm Journal to expect to pay anywhere from $10-$15 per acre and up for AI directed scouting services.

According to market research conducted by Taranis, the first-year ROI for using an AI digital scouting tool in row crops is three times (3x) more than traditional efforts.

Noll explains the process to his farmers in this manner: The drones are like a nurse; they collect a multitude of data points that are provided to the doctor, which could be a farmer or an agronomist, who then uses the data to make in-season management recommendations. The AI itself serves in a complementary role, helping the farmer or agronomist then generate a fact-based recommendation quickly and accurately.

“Once we have their planting dates, we set up a five-pass scouting program,” Noll says, noting different retail programs will offer more or less than five passes. “We plug those into the system, and then based off growing degree days, we can schedule the passes.”

Kerrick Griffes, a seed sales rep with Nutrien Ag Solutions in central Michigan, is excited to put AI-directed, digital crop scouting in front of his growers.

It’s a clear win-win for agronomist and farmer alike.

“These AI-based programs are going to make life easier. I can pull up my iPad, scroll through the dashboard and get a handle for what’s going on with my customers’ fields, and it will tell me where to go first,” Griffes says.

Jeff Schluckbier, a partner-owner with Zwerk & Sons Farms just outside Bay City, Mich., is locked in for a six-pass program on 1,600 acres of sugar beets.

His first flight this season, taken 21 days after planting, revealed an initial thin crop stand and some frost-injured beets, but it was too early to make significant changes.

After his next flight, Schluckbier and Griffes will analyze data before locking in his fertilizer and herbicide programs. The AI will tell them where to push fertility for higher yields, as well as what percent of weeds in each field are broadleaf versus grasses. It even tells them what type of weeds are present.

“The thought is you can see weeds with a drone quicker than walking the field, and the same goes for insect and disease pressure,” Schluckbier explains. “It’s about being more proactive than reactive.”

Generative AI coming soon

Taranis is diving into Generative AI later this year, according to Katie Staton, director of customer success.

Generative AI combs through huge amounts of external data to generate insights that would take humans days, if not weeks, to parse on their own. The as-yet-to-be-named Taranis product will aggregate massive amounts of agronomic and other farm data for users to access.

“Kerrick can make recommendations based off all the data plus his knowledge,” she says. “Taranis takes the trusted adviser role to a whole new height. That will never be replaced by AI alone.”

Griffes seconds that notion as he heads into another season guiding growers in Michigan.

“The drone imagery, the AI insights and the dashboard, they’re not silver bullets, they’re more so another tool in the toolbox,” he says. “For me, it’s like using a laser scope versus iron sights on a hunting rifle.”

More On Scouting And Agronomics

10 Easy Ways to Take Your Crop-Scouting Practices to the Next Level

2024 Is Shaping Up To Bring Out Corn Rootworm

How to Calculate Growing Degree Days (Simple Formula)

Ferrie: How Long Can Corn Survive After Being Under Water?

Intelinair Now Integrates With CNH Brands

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:58:51 GMT

With the goal of improving access to timely agronomic insights for the entire 2024 crop season, Intelinair announces its AGMRI product integrates with CNH equipment and its operating platform. This includes Case IH Brands and the AFS Connect platform and New Holland brands and the MyPLM Connect platform.

The announcement means more streamlined use and experience for farmers, which can lead to more data-driven decision making for farmers and ag retailers.

This includes easy export of field boundary data, as applied, and yield data to AGMRI.

AGMRI Analyze monitors nine yield-limited factors. AGMRI’s agronomic insights include:

Emergence
Weed pressure
Crop health
Variable dry down

“Increasing connectivity options for farmers provides more ways to use technology to help improve efficiency on the farm and protect yield potential,” said Kevin Krieg, Director of Business Development at Intelinair. “This new connection is one more way farmers can efficiently get insights to make real-time data-driven decisions and inform the next year’s crop plan.”

Dan Danford, Precision Technology Partner Manager from CNH, said: “By establishing connections with important partners like Intelinair, we aim to drive interoperability between the various systems and services our customers use to maximize the value of their data and actions in the field.”

John Deere Announces 2024 Startup Collaborators

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 14:35:21 GMT

Deere & Company announced the names of six companies chosen for its 2024 Startup Collaborator program. The John Deere Startup Collaborator program was launched in 2019 to enhance and deepen the company’s interaction with startup companies.

“The program is based on finding benefits for our customers,” said Dennis Muszalski, VP, Module & Electrification Systems Engineering. “The goal is to learn together and explore new ways to help customers unlock more value in ways they never thought possible.”

The companies participating in the 2024 Startup Collaborator include:

Constellr – a company measuring land surface temperature and water from its own satellites at unprecedented accuracy levels to enable insights for a more sustainable future.
Geminos – an artificial intelligence company empowering businesses to understand and leverage causality for enhanced decision-making.
SB Quantum – a quantum sensing company focused on navigation based on a novel quantum magnetometer.
Fermata Energy – a leader in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) bidirectional charging platform technology.
goFlux – a Brazil based logistics company focused on digital solutions to connect the ecosystem for freight transactions.
Cloudscape Labs – a production management software company focused on providing job site visibility across the construction team to help meet production, cost, and safety targets.

“The cohort this year represents a diverse group of solutions that are applicable across a range of challenges and opportunities that our customers face,” said Cody Sorge, Business Development Manager for the John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group.

A Unique Gift the Whole Farm Will Want

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:49:39 GMT

Need a gift for the grower, child or farmer-customer in your life? Two companies have thought of a product that caters to the farm kid in all of us.

Aerial Rug and Boundri are using satellite imagery to create custom farm products that allow imaginations to run wild in farmers young and old. Whether it’s a wall hanging for the farm office, a blanket for a client, or their most popular item: rugs that take carpet farming to the next level.

“I’ve got little kids, and I wanted to create something kind of cool for them,” says Nathan Faleide of Boundri. “I bought a rug and made one of a farm field in North Dakota. I brought some old farm toys that I had as a kid out and they really seemed to enjoy it.”

Faleide, who has a nearly 30-year background in satellite imagery, saw his product quickly go viral on Twitter.

Susan Stroud’s company, Aerial Rug, was built from similar inspiration. Her son’s love for farm toys sparked the idea of farm landscape rugs.

“We created all sorts of different already laid out landscapes like a feed yard in Kansas or a gold mine out west,” Stroud says. “We quickly realized it was a market for something custom and people wanted their own farms on rugs.”

Though both companies started with carpet farming in mind, they recognize their custom items are meaningful for anyone with a passion for agriculture – no matter the age.

“I had one customer who got one of the farm for his dad. His dad is retired and lives in town but it’s in the front door of his house,” Faleide says. “They don’t even own the farm anymore so it’s a nice memento.”

Faleide shares other customers have placed the rugs in their offices or used them for farm safety demonstrations with local schools. Stroud has also had orders from real estate brokers who give them to clients.

How to Bring the Farm Indoors
To get these customized gifts under the Christmas tree, the process varies slightly between the companies.
Aerial Rug uses customer-submitted photos, screenshots, addresses, etc. as a guide to know where to pull satellite images. And according to Stroud, they’re able to work with just about anything.

“Someone sent me a photo of one of those old flyover pictures that were popular in the 80s and 90s,” she says. “We were able to use image enhancing and we printed that old school image on a rug.”

Boundri customers use a free mapping program on the company’s website to build their own product, which the company hopes will save time and improve accuracy. They input their address or zoom into a specific area and manipulate the map view or layers to their liking. Customers can also upload their own drone or logo files to the program.

Both companies are able to use a few different years of satellite imagery if the customer has a preference to the time of year the photo was taken, but there are limitations to what is available in rural areas.

Things to Know Before Ordering
Rugs from either company are available in multiple different sizes, depending on the customer’s needs and price point, and are made from a woven polyester material similar to an outdoor rug.

As for their durability, Faleide has put one to the ultimate test.

“I had an extra rug and gave it to my local daycare where my kids go,” he says. “It’s been played on nonstop for the last year and still looks good. I call that probably 10 years of experience in one year for being at a daycare.”

The size of the farm that will fit on a rug depends as well. Some customers are looking to achieve a 1/64 scale to match the size of farm toys (which according to Stroud would fit 20 to 25 acres), some prefer to have the farmstead prominent, and some just want to include as much land as possible.

Rugs from Aerial Rug take about 10 to 14 days from the time the order is approved by the customer and Boundri will need seven to 10 days from when the order is processed.

If a custom farm rug sounds like the perfect Christmas gift for someone on your list, both companies have set the first week of December as their cutoff to guarantee it makes its way onto Santa’s sleigh.

Is Satellite Imagery the Answer For Better Crop Production Estimates?

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 13:18:53 GMT

About this time of year, there is often a change in the farm atmosphere. The relative inactivity of late summer gives way to serious preparation for harvest, and the size of that harvest is frequently on our minds – like constantly. Early hints of what is in our fields are the hottest gossip items whenever farmers gather.

During my career, and especially the last few years, official estimates of the products of this growing season have been viewed with increasing skepticism. Some doubts are based on the age of traditional methodology, some on suspicions of deliberate tampering and some on theories of interference from outside factors.

One idea that has gained traction is that surveys may not be as accurate as current technology – especially satellite imagery. This could be true, especially since the number of satellites has ballooned as the price to put them in orbit has plunged.

The technology packed in those satellites has improved vastly as well. Satellite maneuverability now makes it possible for real-time stationary overhead observation with everything from sophisticated radar to multiple light wavelengths to astonishing optics.

One popular idea with farmers is sophisticated technology could create better, more frequent crop estimates than in-field surveys like USDA surveys or even our Pro Farmer Crop Tour . Maybe so. Technology also seems to offer less human intervention to counter growing distrust of official institutions of all kinds in the United States.

For crop reports, the USDA struggles with public misunderstanding about the need identical methods to generate data comparable to the past. Much of agriculture also operates in years, not quarters or months. While the agency is cautiously introducing alternate technology, it could be a long time before that’s how crop production reports are routinely generated. Not only do you need several years of side-by-side reporting to assure the new technology actually is an improvement, the same big problem remains: how do you know the right answer?

There is no substitute for an annual calculation of grain sold and bought, and stuff stored on the same date each year – the famed January 31 report. Right now, the least statistically reliable number for this definitive report is farmer-held stocks.

Better crop reports will need first more farmers sending their most accurate numbers, not just different politics or hardware.

(John Phipps’ commentary from 8/26/23 U.S. Farm Report episode)

Geospatial Company Forecasts Yields, Announces Irrigation Software Acquisition

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:22:43 GMT

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.”

John Phipps: What the Crisis in Ukraine is Revealing About the Essential Use of Satellites

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 23:16:22 GMT

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is repeatedly said. And nothing helps clarify what is really necessary like war.

In contrast to the previous century, major conflict between developed countries is only a vague historical concept for most people today. Similar to the world wars and variously labeled conflicts like Korea and Viet Nam, the longer the Ukraine War drags on, the more comparisons we can make between memories of war and the realities.

The battle is upending global economics, trade, and geopolitical alignment. I would venture more national defense strategic plans are being revised with greater urgency that ever before as non-combatants watch and analyze not computer models, but real-world battlefield outcomes. The smaller adaptations being made by the citizens and militaries involved may have a more lasting effect.

For example, the cities of Ukraine are being demolished by a staggering bombardment level. So much so that experts around the world are debating when this year Russia will deplete its arsenal. There are indications it is already rationing artillery rounds and may consider using 40+ year old ammo. Even with careful storage, explosives that old won’t be popular with gun crews.

For Ukrainian civilians, one workaround that has proven its value in this devastation has been Starlink. As Russian barrages destroy cell towers and blow up landlines, bypassing them with an easy-to-use satellite internet connection is not just an option but a lifeline.

Starlink, about which I have spoken perhaps too often, can leapfrog shattered communications infrastructure using just the small dish and a little electricity. The same device that allows campers to get online can keep villages in rubble on the communication grid reliably. This visible proof could be a serious blow to efforts to bring cable and tower internet to remaining sparsely populated regions of the world, and especially US farm country.

Extending urban infrastructure never made economic sense, and as Ukrainians are showing us, the future outside metropolitan areas appears to be the rapidly growing armada of low earth orbit satellites, and soon more Starlink competitors. Maybe instead of billions for optic cable which will be routinely sliced by backhoes, our government should hand out Starlink vouchers.

Mineral: Applying Silicon Valley ‘Superpowers’ To Agriculture

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 19:49:31 GMT

For the past five years, the team at Mineral have been working inside X, the moonshot factory of Alphabet (Google’s parent company).

Today, Mineral graduates as the business is made a standalone company within Alphabet.

What’s the first thing to come from Mineral to the farm?

The company has been working through established ag partners (more than a dozen currently) to develop tools with machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics and geospatial technologies.

“We are hoping to bring a new perspective as an outsider by partnering with those who have deep expertise as existing players in the industry,” says Mineral CEO Elliott Grant. “If we are successful, we will help build a fundamental step change in capabilities with a set of tools that are incredibly powerful.”

Grant shares Mineral wants to apply its expertise a large scale, while respecting the details and anomalies inherent in agriculture. Farmers won’t buy technologies direct from Mineral, but the company’s goal is to have its tools embedded in the inputs, equipment and decision-making tools used by farmers.

“Every farm looks a little different, and every plant looks a little different. We know the models we build have to work across 100,000 different environments, but our strength is in steadily investing in the diversity of data. Technology can handle all these situations when the model built are robust and are built to handle the complexity and analyze the diversity of data in agriculture. It’s our job to bring the user along the ride.”

He says the first product a Mineral partner is likely to bring to market will be around weed detection tools. The team at Mineral says their work spans scouting, identification, mapping, and application.

“One of the areas we’re already seeing a lot of demand for our partners is our ability to identify and model weeds,” says Greg Chiocco, Mineral growth lead. “It’s an area we spend a lot of time and energy on as the implications of weed modeling are endless.”

The data Mineral is collecting is another of its core competencies.

With its work, Mineral has developed an image database of more than 17 crops in every stage of growth in multiple environments. It’s being used for modeling and can be used in many projects with partners.

“Much like an Android model, we aren’t one fully closed ecosystem. We have an open ecosystem,” says Mineral Chief Operating Officer Erica Bliss. “We think about how ag is evolving, and it’s not about just one set of tools. We think it’ll take this open approach to tackle to the nuanced and local challenges.”

A visual example of the work Mineral is doing is the rover platform.

The rover is a four-wheeled semi-autonomous platform Mineral has developed over four years. There are multiple configurations of the machine from narrow row configurations to high clearance. The core functionality of the rover is as a data collection machine.

“Think of this as our Google Streetview car,” Grant says. “It’s not a final product. It’s a research tool.”

The rover can collect 1 million image a day to measure characteristics of plants. For example, in one 24-hour period one rover collected nearly 6 million images measuring a dozen plant traits for R&D purposes.

One company Mineral has said its partnering with in the input space is Syngenta.

Another partner in the specialty crop business has yielded multiple projects moving forward.

Driscoll’s has been a partner of Mineral to help it solve two problems: in-field harvest analysis for its berry crops and post-harvest crop condition ratings.

While harvesting strawberries and raspberries comes with challenges on assessing crop condition, a specific technology has been developed to monitor the crop in the field.

“It wasn’t just that we increased the yield harvested, the human experts got better,” says. “They got better insights on yield forecasting so they learned why the machine was making the prediction.”

Grant adds, “It may surprise some people that artificial intelligence isn’t replacing people. Rather, it’s a co-pilot to help decision making by pointing out anomalies.”

The second project illustrates how artificial intelligence is used to assess the conditions of harvested berries including color, size, bruising and more.

This application can be run on a mobile phone. It only requires a blue background and a color key card for calibration.

One focus for the team at Mineral is to make its technology easier to use in the field.

With its partners at Alphabet providing proprietary chips, Mineral is excited to accelerate the use of Edge Computing—meaning there doesn’t have to be a strong, consistent internet connection to run computer applications, collect images, make maps and make decisions.

Grant shares how the devices have gotten smaller and smaller in the past five years.

“Something that can be held in two hands is able to provide stereo imagery, its own lighting, computing power, GPS and power management for the rover,” he says. “It’s getting lighter, cheaper and more powerful every year.”

In fact, they are working to build products for situations without connectivity.

“We shouldn’t assume high bandwidth is available,” he says. “Doing this work on The Edge for the next decade is critical.”

What about other well-known Google technologies?

When asked about geospatial, Grant says the team at Mineral benefits from the work done at its sister company Google Earth. He adds Google Earth has been an amazing tool for researchers and has moved the needle for the GIS system.

“We benefit from generating data from the Google Earth engine and built a layer translated to ag specific with field boundaries, crop types cover crops and tillage,” Grant says.

Mineral has analyzed 10% of the total farmland—which means of the 4 billion acres on Earth for farmland. 450 million acres of farmland are in the Mineral platform.

“Scale is in our DNA, and one our superpowers is scale,” Grant says.

While Google Glass has so far been taken off the shelf for the consumer market for more industrial applications, Grant doesn’t rule it out as a future platform for innovation.

“I think there’s a future in which the interaction isn’t intermediated by a phone. Perhaps it’s headworn. The computing power is there. But if it will be a face worn AR device, I don’t know. But the fundamental tech is there,” he says.

So what’s Mineral’s vision for the future of agriculture?

Grant says, “Five years from now, I would hope the tools we imagine, a machine learning enabled co-pilot for example, is no more remarkable than using Google Maps for navigation.”

Climate Corp Expands Crop Analysis Tools

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 03:04:32 GMT

To increase in-season aerial imagery and enhance crop analysis, Climate Corporation is partnering with Ceres Imaging, TerrAvion and Agribotix. Farmers will have access to additional high-resolution images on top of Climate’s current interconnected platform.

Climate is activating a commercial pilot with Ceres and TerrAvion in specific regions within the U.S. to provide more images throughout the season. Farmers who would like to use Agribotix solution can visit their website to learn more about how to integrate it. Current Climate customers will soon be able to request these features from their Climate Field View account.

“As aerial imagery becomes of greater interest to farmers as a valuable tool to more efficiently manage their operations, we’re thrilled to collaborate with these companies to equip more farmers with the data-driven insights they need through one connected digital ag platform,” says Mark Young, chief technology officer at Climate Corporation.

Each of the new partners provides unique benefits. Ceres Imaging, of Oakland, Calif., provides high-resolution spectral imagery with university-validated agronomic insights. TerrAvion, of San Leandro, Calif., provides operation imagery and says it offers operational reliability, speedy delivery and availability through retail agronomy locations. Agribotix, of Boulder, Colo., uses drones to provide data analysis and reporting solutions for farmers, cooperatives, agronomist and other retailers.

Veris Technologies, announced in 2016, was Climate’s first platform partner. The company anticipates adding more regions and partners in the future.

Syngenta Acquires FarmShots

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 18:30:13 GMT

Syngenta recently announced it purchased FarmShots, Inc. of North Carolina. FarmShots provides high-resolution satellite imagery on its eight million enrolled acres.

FarmShots images provide plant health information by analyzing light absorption. The company uses cloud-based software and interfaces to create images that give indications of field conditions.

“FarmShots is a new and unique service that helps us deliver on our commitment to further develop farm management and crop decision-making tools,” says Dan Burdett, Syngenta head, global digital agriculture. “We expect to incorporate FarmShots into our digital portfolio and rapidly accelerate growth from the current eight million enrolled acres in the United States, and globally soon after.”

The system can be used on many devices, from phones to laptops, for access to farmer data anywhere, anytime. It provides a prescription map for input application or other actions to farmers and their advisers.

Syngenta will integrate FarmShots into its AgriEdge Excelsior, a U.S. farm management system that will eventually be a global program. The company says its “privacy pledge” that allows growers to maintain control of their data is still intact with this acquisition.

Farmers Edge Increases Satellite Image Frequency

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 18:25:37 GMT

By partnering with Planet, aerospace and data analytics company, Farmers Edge will offer satellite images more frequently—every one to three days.

“It’s a sole distributorship in the majority of the key ag markets such as Canada, U.S., Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, former Soviet Union and others,” says Wade Barnes, president and CEO of Farmers Edge. “Farmers see the power of imagery and want more—thus farm what we’ve been getting is data every one to three days. I’ve been getting it every day on my own farm.”

Planet says they have the highest number of satellites available which means even with potential cloud cover farmers should still receive images frequently and at a high enough resolution to identify potential issues. The company will combine the satellite images it receives from Planet with analytics software to assist farmers throughout the growing season.

“What we’re finding is with higher resolution and frequency we can ID where there is insect damage in crops early stages, which could tell farmers if they need to replant,” Barnes adds. “We can also identify fertilizer stripping which can be used to adjust fertilizer application later and save yield.”

Farmers can see all of this information from their office on their Farmers Edge program—saving time scouting. And when farmers do enter fields to scout, they can pinpoint problem areas to check on again later in the season.

“Farmers Edge is consistently at the cutting edge of innovation in agricultural technology, and we’re proud to expand our partnership with them as we work to improve profitability, sustainability, and efficiency for the world’s producers,” said Will Marshall, CEO of Planet. “The challenges faced by the agriculture industry are complex in nature and global in scale, and we believe our data is uniquely positioned to solve agricultural challenges.”

Farmers Edge costs from $2 to $4.5 per acre depending on the level of service provided.