EOSDA Crop Monitoring – making agriculture easy with space technologies
Country of development/application:
USA
Scope of innovation
☐ Office work
☒ Production / Service supply process
Sector-specific
☒ Yes / please, specify sector(s): Agriculture
☐ No (relevant for all sectors)
Description of the needs
Worried about the state of crops when you’re not looking? Based on satellite images, EOSDA Crop Monitoring helps farmers to manage multiple fields, cut costs on resources and take reliable decisions. Big data covers big issues.
• Easy-to-read maps;
• Data-driven decisions;
• AI cloud mask;
• Vegetation indices;
• Field leaderboard.
Tired of wasting your budget on inefficient fertilizing methods? Variable rate application will help farmers save up to 20% on seeds and fertilizers. Zoning can be used to reveal field’s true productivity and vegetation maps.
• Productivity maps;
• Vegetation maps;
• Prescription maps;
• Compatibility with top manufacturers equipment.
Problems with your crops go unnoticed until it’s way too late? Satellite monitoring allows for early and more accurate problem areas detection.
• On-field changes notifications;
• Precise problem area detection;
• Downloadable scout reports;
• Mobile app to assist scouts.
Unexpected weather events tamper with your crops productivity levels? Solution: a 14-day weather forecast for each individual field for a more flexible planning.
• Historical weather data archive;
• Reliable 14-day weather forecast;
• Weather risk assessment.
Find it extremely hard to keep track of all your field activities throughout the season? Field activity log allows effortless planning and monitoring of the field activities for all of the crops in one place. Now it’s all under control.
• Easy-to-handle activity organizer and planner;
• Notifications about deviations from schedule (coming soon);
• Notifications about equipment failure (coming soon);
• Automated activity cost estimation;
• Analysis of costs, deviations from schedule, and more;
• Machinery and equipment allocation.
Description of the solution
Making agriculture is easy with space technologies:
• Saves time;
• Reduces costs;
• Improves yields.
EOSDA Crop Monitoring is a software which relies on the latest satellite data, processed and analyzed with widely-used and custom algorithms, such as field contours, tile-based map rendering, VI dynamics, cloud/shadow mapping, change detection, among others. Farmers can monitor multiple fields at once, track the VI change in correlation with the weather, growth stages, crop rotation, and other data. They can get notified via email and make precision-driven decisions, thus increasing yields and revenue.
Field monitoring
Farmers can have a bird’s-eye view of their fields and get notified about both regular and abnormal changes in the state of their crops throughout the season, based on the automatic VI calculations.
The first step in order to get access to all of the features available in the software is to add the fields. Adding the fields to the system is like laying the foundation for the entire process of monitoring of the crops. As soon fields are added, the farmer will get access to all of the valuable data such as vegetation indices, growth stages, historical crop rotation, weather forecasts, among others. In order to make the user experience as convenient as possible, two different ways of doing so are offered by the platform:
• Uploading fields (adding .shp, .kml, and/or .geojson files into the system);
• Drawing polygon (outlining the fields manually on the map).
Once fields are added, below them on the screen appears an analytics window chart, where the user can monitor the vegetation indices, temperature fluctuations, precipitation rates, and weather risks (such as winter kill, cold or heat stress). On the right is the field’s data, with separate sections on crop rotation and weather, as well as a button for setting a scouting task. At this point the farmer is ready to manage the field.
Vegetation indices
The farmer can benefit from the algorithm that identifies vegetation density levels on the field throughout the season.
Human eyes are excellent remote sensors of, say, the nicely saturated green color of a healthy plant. They are also good at detecting the not-so-healthy yellow hues. What they are bad at, however, is seeing in the deep red, or NIR (near infrared), and on the edge between the two.
By using EOSDA Crop Monitoring the farmer enters multispectral imagery from space, aimed at determining the vegetation density, growth rate and by extension, general health. It all boils down to the absorption and reflection of different wavelengths of light. A healthy plant reflects a lot of near-infrared light, which a human eye can’t see at all.
EOSDA Crop Monitoring offers four vegetation indices at the service of farmers as the more indices they use, the wider their scope beyond the visible range becomes. Monitoring the health of the crops from four different angles is recommended, depending on the stages of growth. EOSDA Crop Monitoring uses NDVI, NDRE, MSAVI and ReCl. The platform also uses NDMI – Moisture Level Detection Index.
Improved cloud mask
Satellite imagery benefits multiple industries flaunting a wide range of applications. Yet, it would not be entirely possible without cloud masking techniques. Unlike SAR aperture, optical satellite sensors cannot provide a clear image on a cloudy day, so the issue has to be fixed. This is when cloud masking proves to be an efficient problem solution. This way, the process gets seamless. While satellites observe the situation from the sky, EOSDA computes spatial data with specific algorithms for actionable analytics.
The EOSDA technology helps identify and differentiate dense cloud coverage, atmospheric haze, and shadows. The EOSDA specialists employ the convolutional neural network (CNN) for detection. The CNN architecture is chosen with respect to the operation time and quality. The network is of the encoder-decoder type, which proves to be efficient and is typically used for cloud segmentation.
Weather Analytics
Winter kill, heat stress, cold stress, and finding the perfect timing for both sowing and harvesting, are hugely important factors in modern agriculture. A farmer has to know exactly when and how to apply fertilizers, when to sow, and when to harvest. EOSDA Crop Monitoring has been specifically designed with these issues in mind. Its weather analytics tab is to inform the farmer not just about current weather conditions, but also about the possible risks, growth stages of crops, vegetation indices value, historical weather, and to create a forecast for the near future.
Growth stages
Because of the strong impact of plant growth stages on agricultural productivity, their shifts can have enormous financial consequences for farmers. As a result, it is essential to keep an eye on stages of plant growth and make timely adjustments to ensure the crop matures on schedule and remains healthy. Temperature and precipitation, in particular, play a significant role in dictating the schedules of plant growth stages. Monitoring stages of plant growth can also alert farmers to potential problems with the surrounding environment, which can help them make more informed decisions about how to manage their fields.
EOSDA Crop Monitoring precision agriculture platform uses weather data to determine when crops are at what stages of growth. That means the platform allows for accurate tracking of the crop’s development at any time, even if no satellite images are available during this period.
Crop rotation
Crop rotation was integral to farming before the widespread adoption of chemically intensive practices. Growers used it to prevent soil erosion, suppress weeds, and occasionally even combat pests and diseases. While the crop rotation system is not commonly practiced nowadays, its ecological and agronomic benefits are indisputable.
EOSDA Crop Monitoring can carry out a comprehensive suite of field monitoring functions for optimal rotation planning and implementation. Particularly, the precision agriculture platform helps track when crops were planted and harvested regarding one another across different fields. This data paints a clearer picture of a farm’s state and provides the ability to develop a sustainable agriculture strategy.
Description of the effect
According to company’s data, over 950,000 users rely on EOSDA Crop Monitoring to monitor over 21,000,000 hectares of the Earth’s surface. That’s about the same area as Guyana!
Return on investment (ROI) is up to $43/acre for 87% of EOSDA Crop Monitoring farmers, according to company’s statistics:
• ROI up to $1.17/acre thanks to improved accuracy of planning based on reliable weather forecasts;
• ROI up to $26.9/acre by reducing costs on planting & fertilizing with VRA maps;
• ROI up to $9.8/acre thanks to early crop stress detection;
• ROI up to $3.4/acre with easy-to-use mobile scouting app backed by satellite imagery data.
Company/companies that developed/implemented/offer the innovation
EOS Data Analytics is one of the leading global geospatial analytics providers on the market, partnering with governmental, commercial, and scientific organizations. EOSDA creates satellite-driven solutions for agriculture, forestry, and mining, while also actively exploring 22 more industries. The Company sees its mission as helping businesses around the world become more sustainable via innovative precision observation and data analytics tools.
Headquarters
EOS Data Analytics Inc.
800 W. El Camino Real, Suite 180, Mountain View, CA 94040, USA
E-mail: sales@eosda.com
Website: https://eos.com/
Contact form: https://eos.com/contact-us/
Additional information
A potential user can get familiar with the Platform by exploring his personal demo account https://crop-monitoring.eos.com/login?_ga=2.113577487.904511743.1688022160-423746154.1688022159
EOSDA Crop Monitoring Overview – satellite-based precision agriculture platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69KYFXDGoU8&t=1s&ab_channel=EOSDataAnalytics