When EOS first launched in 2015, it relied largely on imagery from a mix of satellites, particularly the European Union’s Sentinel-2. However Sentinel-2 has a most decision of 10 meters, making it of restricted use for recognizing points on smaller farms, says Yevhenii Marchenko, the corporate’s gross sales workforce lead.
So final 12 months the corporate launched EOS SAT-1, a satellite tv for pc designed and operated solely for agriculture. Charges to make use of the crop-monitoring platform now begin at $1.90 per hectare per 12 months for small areas and drop because the farm will get bigger. (Farmers who can afford to have adopted drones and different associated applied sciences, however drones are considerably costlier to take care of and scale, says Marchenko.)
In lots of creating international locations, farming is impaired by lack of knowledge. For hundreds of years, farmers relied on native intelligence rooted in expertise and hope, says Daramola John, a professor of agriculture and agricultural know-how at Bells College of Know-how in southwest Nigeria. “Africa is approach behind within the race for modernizing farming,” he says. “And loads of farmers endure large losses due to it.”
Within the spring of 2023, when the brand new planting season was to begin, Tope’s firm, Carmi Agro Meals, had used GPS-enabled software program to map the boundaries of its farm. Its setup on the EOS crop monitoring platform was additionally accomplished. Tope used the platform to find out the suitable spacing for the stems and seeds. The pains and dangers of guide monitoring had disappeared. Hisfield-monitoring officers wanted solely to look at their telephones to know the place or when particular spots wanted consideration on varied farms. He was capable of observe weed breakouts rapidly and effectively.
This know-how is gaining traction amongst farmers in different components of Nigeria and the remainder of Africa. Greater than 242,000 individuals in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the US, and Europe use the EOS crop-monitoring platform. In 2023 alone, 53,000 extra farmers subscribed to the service.
