Incredible as it may seem, during one of the weekly updates between members of our Data Services Team they calculated that we have surveyed over one million fields in the last year. When we take into account the number of repeat visits to some of these fields, the land area we have covered is well over 600 million km². We’re always busy in the UK but more recently we have been expanding our focus to include Latin America. We have covered huge areas of soybean cultivation in Brazil and Argentina, 70,000 km² in Peru and 68,000 km² in Colombia for the EO4cultivar project. In addition, under the project extension, we have also surveyed areas of Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras, Belize, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and Mexico.
In most cases we are mapping commercial farms. We have become quite the experts in banana plantation maps for example! When we say mapped it is more accurate to say classified and monitored. In many instances no maps exist and we have become very adept, using our own algorithms, in creating field maps so that farmers and their supply chains can readily identify and deal with issues as they arise. Multi-temporal monitoring of crops and identification of growth stages is beginning to revolutionise the way that growers manage their assets.
Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites provide the majority of the data we process but we are also avid consumers of Planet and other commercial sources, with much of the analyses automated using our own algorithms developed in-house.