Building Agriculture Solutions Faster: Earth Observation in the Cloud
PlanetScope image of fields in southern Queensland, Australia, captured February 10, 2023. © 2023 Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved.
TechAgriculture companies are faced with a need to increase yields and reduce costs — all while minimizing environmental impacts. To solve these challenges, they are turning to data and analytics: machine data, yield data, field application data, weather data, and more.
One data source that is crucial for any agriculture company to consider is Earth observation (EO) data. High-frequency satellite data allows analysts to monitor change over broad areas, identify patterns, and accelerate decision making.
And as EO data becomes more valuable, so do custom applications that simplify and streamline data analysis. Let’s explore how you can use Planet Insights Platform to develop applications that improve agriculture outcomes.
Challenges Putting Satellite Data to Work
While EO data offers limitless possibilities for monitoring and understanding change, it can be challenging to work with.
Not only is it complex, but the amount of data available is growing rapidly. The agricultural sector in particular is seeing an expansion of satellite data, ranging from multispectral to advanced datasets that estimate biomass, soil moisture, and more. This combination often requires extensive expertise and a substantial upfront investment, resulting in slow, costly, and complex workflows.
But what if you could bypass the complexity and go straight to analyzing and integrating EO data into your workflow or solution? That’s the idea behind customer apps.
Why Build Your Own App?
Building your own app is attractive if you’re working with non-expert users who need an easier way to use satellite data, or if you’re prototyping a solution or feature. In addition, solving challenges common to agriculture typically requires integrating EO data with other information systems and building processing pipelines, and apps can help you visualize the outputs.
They can be built to support a wide range of processes or outcomes. A few common use cases in agriculture include:
- Field Monitoring and Scouting: Identifying areas of crop stress to direct field teams more efficiently, helping mitigate issues faster.
- Variable Rate Application: Creating precise application zones to optimize agriculture inputs, reducing costs and environmental impacts.
- Field Trials: Comparing performance of field trials to measure the effectiveness of different treatments — quickly and at scale.
- Pasture Management: Optimizing forage production for livestock, maintaining healthy pastures, and maximizing productivity with efficient, rotational grazing schedules.
Planet Insight Platform offers tools to streamline the process of integrating EO data into your apps and workflows.
Building Apps With Planet Insights Platform
An NDVI time series generated on Planet Insights Platform, as demonstrated in the Agile EO webinar.
Planet Insights Platform isn't just another tool to access data; it’s a solution for getting started with EO data quickly — and a catalyst for innovation in agtech.
By providing an accessible, scalable, and reliable way to build EO-powered solutions, it empowers companies to stop simply managing data and start analyzing and solving problems to shape the future of agriculture.
It includes several tools to help you develop apps that process EO data. For prototyping a workflow, you can get started with the Planet Browser, your satellite imagery workbench. The browser application allows you to explore imagery from a variety of sources, such as Sentinel or Landsat, and test different analyses powered by evalscripts.
Planet Docs AI is a new resource to accelerate your work on Planet Insights Platform. For example, you can ask it to create a custom evalscript for a certain spectral index, and it will generate one to use with the APIs and SDK.
And when you are ready to integrate imagery into your workflow, Requests Builder can help you configure API requests needed for app development. Simply set up the parameters for when, where, and what you need to analyze, and it will provide you code snippets for using our APIs and SDKs in your own workflow.
Requests Builder showing executable code snippets that can be used in your workflows, as demonstrated in the Agile EO webinar.
Cloud-Native Earth Observation With Planet Insights Platform
Planet Insights Platform also has features to enhance workflow efficiency.
Example web application demonstrating modeling of pasture biomass for a pasture management use case, as demonstrated in the Agile EO webinar.
Cloud processing
Instead of beginning data analysis by downloading or moving data into your own cloud infrastructure, Planet Insights Platform allows you to tap directly into imagery in the Planet cloud.
Imagery streaming APIs
APIs and SDKs are available for you to seamlessly integrate imagery into your front end web applications, accelerating development timelines and making it easier to prototype workflows with fewer systems and resources.
Unified EO data access
Planet Insights Platform provides the ability to access both Sentinel imagery and high-frequency, near-daily PlanetScope imagery, the latter being particularly valuable for monitoring crops in often-cloudy regions.
Self-service pricing
Planet recently introduced a new self-service pricing model available for Area Under Management. This change is designed to help you start small and pay for data as needed, to scale your business and customer base with ease.
We showcase all of these features in our recent webinar, Agile EO: Develop Apps for Agriculture With Planet Insights Platform. You can see them in action, along with the tips for building apps, during the demo portion (starting around the 10 minute mark).
Watch the Webinar and Start Building
Ready to see more? Watch the full webinar to get more details and see the live demonstration of these powerful tools.
Curious to try it for yourself? Get hands-on with the features discussed and start building your own ag-tech applications today with seamless integration to Earth observation datasets. Start your free 30-day trial of Planet Insights Platform.
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