b'PARTNER CONTENTTop Five Misconceptions About Satellite Imagery for AgricultureDrive Profitable, Sustainable Farming with PlanetL ike the rest of the world, the agriculture industry is beingdate imagery from our daily monitoring ultimately provides a transformed by technology. Digital agriculture promiseshigher likelihood of getting usable data, especially when the risk growers increased production and savings on input costof weather events like clouds can impact data continuity.while delivering more sustainable farming.To help deliver on this lofty potential, Planets supplies daily,4. Drones are the best solution for insights. Satellites are too high resolution satellite imagery to help analyse crop health andcoarse in spatial resolution to tell me anything.drive value for growers. Drones are great. They deliver higher resolution imagery over Planets vision is to deliver precise and reliable field-level cropfields and are capable of delivering detailed insights to growers. information to help agriculture companies and their growersBut drones are expensive to fly and they can only cover so much optimize inputs, monitor crop health, and improve yield. Weveground. Plus, you have to know where you want to fly ahead of gathered the top misconceptions about using satellite imagery fortime and schedule that flight.agriculture. With satellite imagery, you may trade spatial resolution for coverage, but when you need to deliver reliable cost effective 1. My customers dont trust results from satellite data. insights at scale, theres really no alternative.We find the opposite. In addition to sending out people into theWhile some satellite imagery may be too fuzzy to discern field to gather information, satellite data and insights can actuallyuseful insights, PlanetScopes medium (3.7 m) spatial resolution increase trust and help identify problems in the field. Our custom- is ideal for discerning fine details, even in smaller-scale farming ers build vegetative indices that visualise crop health and thenoperations. And PlanetScopes satellites are always on.deploy that data to their growers and agronomists.Theres no need to task them ahead of time. They deliver cov-In many instances, a phone or tablet app helps spot watererage of every acre on earth.stress or disease, efficiently directing attention to locations in the field. Others build out reporting mechanisms that even email a list5. Public data is good enough, and commercial satellite data of areas for inspection.isnt cost-effective.Public Earth observation data from missions like Landsat and 2. My customers wont be able to do anything with imagery, theySentinel can provide a ton of valuable information to scientists, want answers. researchers, and analysts.A satellite image is more than meets the eye. By combining dataIts free data, but getting insight from that free data is not. from different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, satelliteThere are significant, time-consuming and expensive challenges data can be used to assess crop vitality with indices like the involved in getting pipelines in place to transform public imag-Normalized Difference Vegetative Index (NDVI), which showsery into clean, processed data, and this can be a huge burden on whether plants are under stress, and what lifecycle stage a crop is in. customers and end users.Planet customers use our APIs to generate analytic visualisa- Planets modern, cloud-first APIs help process, stream, and tions that they integrate into their digital platforms, helping farm- deliver analysis ready data at scale with the growth of your ers optimise their inputs like fertilizers and stay on top of threatsbusiness.to their crops. With Planet, you can leverage the processing power of our platform to focus your expertise on your applications versus 3. We only need a few images over the growing season. building your own imagery processing and cloud infrastructure.For some agricultural use cases, a few images during the growing season can provide base level information on crop health but notStill Weighing Your Options?nearly enough to really take the best action. Visit us at planet.com/ag to learn more about innovative appli-Some crops present relatively narrow time windows for actioncations of satellite imagery in agriculture, and reach out to our specific to key growth stages. Having a reliable source of up-to- team at sales@planet.com if you have questions.DECEMBER 2021SEEDWORLD.COM /129'