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Satellite view of irrigated fields in the Imperial Valley, California, between El Centro and Holtville.

Imperial Valley, California, March 2025. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025.

Smart Farming with Satellite Data

Enhancing crop monitoring and yield forecasts.

Satellite Earth Observation is now part of everyday precision farming. Multispectral imagery, from open sources such as Sentinel-2 [1] and from sharper commercial satellites, lets farmers and agribusinesses monitor vegetation health, soil moisture, and crop development over large areas [2]. For instance, Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) maps derived from satellite data help identify stressed crops early [3], allowing for timely interventions such as irrigation adjustments or targeted fertilisation. This data-driven approach can improve yield forecasting, reduce input costs, and lower environmental impact [2][4].

In practice, this can have a massive impact on the management of farms. As 4EI have found in some of their case studies, using analytics derived from Earth Observation imagery helped to improve wheat farm yields by 15% from early detection and intervention of disease in crops [4]. In another case, they found that Bean Farmers could reduce their fertiliser costs by 18%, from using Earth Observation to monitor soil nutrient levels and create fertility maps [4]. These analytics can be integrated into farm management platforms, enabling intuitive, map-based dashboards that bring complex geospatial data into actionable insights.

Sentinel-2 NDVI image from 2016 of farmland along the Milk River in Alberta, with healthy vegetation in green and sparse vegetation in red.

Above shows a 2016 Sentinel 2 Image, the green depicts vegetation in this normalised difference vegetation index image of land along the Milk River in Alberta [5]. Sourced from USGS.

References

  1. European Space Agency. S2 Mission. SentiWiki, Copernicus Sentinel Online. https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/web/s2-mission
  2. Weiss, M., Jacob, F. and Duveiller, G. Remote sensing for agricultural applications: A meta-review. Remote Sensing of Environment, 236, 111402, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111402
  3. U.S. Geological Survey, EROS Center. NDVI. Earthshots, USGS. https://eros.usgs.gov/earthshots/ndvi
  4. 4Earth Intelligence. 4EI’s Sustainability of Agriculture with Earth Observation. 4Earth Intelligence, 5 July 2024. https://www.4earthintelligence.com/insights/4eis-sustainability-of-agriculture-with-earth-observation/
  5. U.S. Geological Survey, EROS Center. Sentinel-2 Alberta NDVI. USGS, 2016. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/sentinel-2-alberta-ndvi