Planet Labs Satellite Images Now Available to Ukrainian Agribusiness
The most distinctive feature of agribusiness today is the opportunity to combine the intuition and experience of professional agronomists with high technologies that capture subtle changes in the field. The AgriChain company takes monitoring of the state of crops to a qualitatively new level and is one of the first in Ukraine to start cooperation with Planet Labs, the flagship of monitoring the earth’s surface from space.
“From now on, in order to monitor the state of crops, the level of vegetation, the quality of seedlings in the fields of Astarta, AgriChain will use not only the usual market images from Sentinel-2 satellites, which are used by most companies, but will cooperate with the company Planet Labs. And this is only the beginning of cooperation based on Astarta’s capabilities. In the future, we plan to expand cooperation and provide services for other market participants on a commercial basis. But more on that later,” says Nataliya Bogacheva, director of the AgriChain company.
Planet Labs is an American private company founded by former NASA employees back in 2010. It explores the Earth’s surface with the help of miniature CubeSat satellites. These are small-sized satellites with a cubic shape of 10x10x10 cm³, weighing no more than 1.33 kg, which are delivered to orbit as payloads of other space objects. Each such satellite has its own name, but in general they are called dove. Their fleet of over 200 Earth-imaging satellites is the largest in the history of observing our planet.
Each “pigeon” is equipped with a powerful telescope, camera and modern software for filming different areas of the earth’s surface. All satellites carry out continuous imaging of the Earth, which makes it possible to obtain daily images of the surface with a resolution of up to 3.5 meters per pixel.
Planet Labs provides daily satellite data that helps companies, governments, researchers and journalists understand the physical world and take action. Therefore, AgriChain’s cooperation with Planet Labs is capable of revolutionizing the monitoring of the vegetation of the Astarta fields, because for the agronomic service, such high-quality and frequent images provide an opportunity to more effectively analyze the general state of the field, identify problem areas, evaluate the dynamics of the quality of technological operations, forecast the planned yield, analyze the impact of weather conditions, natural phenomena or natural disasters and promptly make management decisions.
Nataliya Bogacheva, director of the AgriChain company, explains: “Astarta’s agricultural production department has chosen the fields where they want to monitor the state of the crops. This is how we start working with 20,000 hectares and will continue to increase the volume. When choosing pilot enterprises, priority was given to agricultural companies that work with elements of precision agriculture – Zhytnytsia Podillya LLC and Musiivske gas station. This choice will allow us to develop precision farming tools using high-quality satellite imagery. And already, starting in August, we provide the agronomic service with Planet Labs images for the analysis of seedlings of winter rapeseed crops.”
“Through the API (Application Programming Interface) of the Planet Labs application, we integrated the service into our AgriChain Scout system, which has been used in ASTARTA for 2 seasons to monitor the condition of crops. We set up the exchange, tightened the geometry of all the fields that were interesting to the business, and every day our system processes the images provided by the Planet Labs company on these fields. Currently, we are finalizing the technical component of setting up the correct display of the geometry of some fields, after which we plan to conduct training for specialists of ASTARTA’s agronomic service,” adds Anatoliy Kovalchuk, AgriChain project manager.
Satellite images of this quality, processed by the algorithms of the AgriChain program, allow you to quickly and remotely analyze large tracts of land, single out problem areas, create inspection tasks based on them and promptly respond to possible risks. And all this is possible thanks to the fact that the pictures have a resolution of 3.5 meters per pixel. 3.5 meters per pixel! Can you imagine? Actually, these are the pictures that the company will receive every day. This will make it possible to increase their number in the season, that is, to choose high-quality frames without clouds in order to accurately control the condition of the crops from the point of view of visualization.
Today, the main task before us is to ensure the maximum production volume that ASTARTA can obtain in order to continue its operational and charitable activities as efficiently as possible.
Currently, the AgriChain company has become the provider of satellite images of the Planet Labs company in Ukraine, this service will first of all be implemented for the needs of the Astarta company, in the future it is planned to commercialize the product for existing and new customers of the company.
About the company:
AgriChain IT solutions are created for large and medium-sized agribusinesses, individual applications solve the problems of agricultural producers cultivating from 5,000 hectares.
Contacts:
sales@agrichain.ua –
sales department
support@agrichain.ua –
technical support service
info@agrichain.ua –
office manager
Office address:
Developed in Ukraine
About the company:
AgriChain IT solutions are created for large and medium-sized agribusinesses, individual applications solve the problems of agricultural producers cultivating from 5,000 hectares.
sales@agrichain.ua – sales department
support@agrichain.ua – technical support service
info@agrichain.ua – office manager