Data, Data Everywhere: Insights from Three Days at InfoAg

InfoAg 2015, day one: exhibition floor

It’s been an eventful week in St. Louis, Missouri for Planet Labs. We attended Info Ag 2015—our first big agriculture industry event.

Planet’s co-founder and president Robbie Schingler, along with other team members, joined me at the conference. I participated in a remote sensing panel, my first public speech as a Planet rep; and Robbie gave the closing keynote, detailing the ways we believe our imagery will make a valuable impact in agriculture.

Robbie Schingler talks “agile aerospace” on the mainstage at InfoAg’s closing session.

It’s clear that the agriculture industry is experiencing massive technological change right now —under the moniker of ‘precision ag’—and is ready for new and novel datasets to increase crop yield and more efficiently and effectively feed people all over the globe. After speaking with many at the conference, the Planet team gleaned a few insights.

High Resolution, Multi-Temporal Adds a New Dimension
For a long time, the Ag industry has lacked multi-temporal high resolution Near Infrared (NIR) and RGB imaging. This spatial/temporal data scarcity issue is ending. There are more imagery providers than ever before, helping farmers and growers with crop health monitoring, yield analysis, scouting, and land productivity analysis.

Global Coverage with Automated, Local Insights
More data is not always a good thing. Farmers are already overwhelmed by having too much data and too many technology choices. The key is to deliver timely and relevant insights in an integrated and automated fashion. Farmers are looking for relevant field- and local-level information that they can integrate with their existing technology providers.

Innovators Are Jumping In
Farmers are developing good relationships with technology providers who understand their profitability goals, input selections, local growing conditions, and crop health issues. These companies are best positioned to turn Planet Labs data into actionable insights. Industry-leading companies are ready to embrace the future of imaging technology, whether that’s Planet’s frequent, global satellite imagery, or drone and aerial coverage.

Planet’s a relatively new player in the Ag industry, and I’m pleased that our whole team was very well received by the Ag community. We learned a lot about the priorities, needs and challenges facing agriculture and met with farmers and partners— like our customers at Wilbur-Ellis— to explore use cases for global, daily Earth imagery.

We’re excited to get back to work, armed with a greater understanding of the Ag community’s needs, to build solutions that advance precision Ag and make a positive impact for those in the field.

To learn more about our agriculture solutions, visit: https://info.planet.com/ag/ or email me at Ryan.Schacht@planet.com.