The Climate Corporation is adding multiple sources of aerial imagery to its digital agriculture platform, Climate FieldView, to complement the satellite imagery it has offered for years.
In the last six months, The Climate Corporation has announced plans to work with Ceres Imaging of Oakland, California, TerrAvion of San Leandro, California, Agribotix of Boulder, Colorado and Deveron UAS Corp. of Toronto, companies that gather agricultural imagery with sensors on piloted aircraft or drones.
Farmers use Climate FieldView’s satellite imagery to quickly see and analyze the health of their fields and high-resolution aerial imagery with frequent revisits to obtain detailed insights concerning the health of their crops, said Mark Young, chief technology officer for The Climate Corporation, a San Francisco-based subsidiary of Monsanto.
Farmers can turn to either satellite or aerial imagery, for example, to determine whether fields are plagued by pests or the soil is too dry. With high-resolution aerial imagery, they can figure out the type of pest or the extent of crop stress, Young said.
“The more imagery, the better,” Young said. “Bringing in additional imagery diversity allows us to uncover even more insights related to grain moisture, nitrogen stress and harvest timing.”
The Climate Corporation plans to continue to add imagery to Climate FieldView from satellites, aerial and ground-based sensors. “We have found that many of our customers use a variety of data from diverse sources to optimize their operations,” Young said.
Agriculture monitoring is one element of the growing Earth-observation market, which consulting firm Northern Sky Research suggested would be worth $52 billion in 2026, according to the report Satellite-based Earth Observation 9th Edition, published in October. Government agencies will continue to dominate the market, but demand also will grow for imagery to support agriculture and forestry, energy and natural resources and industrial applications, according to the report.
