New SatAgro Crop Monitoring and Management Platform for South Africa
by Southern Mapping
Southern Mapping, a Woolpert company based in South Africa, who provides a range of aerial Lidar & ortho surveys, satellite imagery and geospatial services for a variety of sectors, is proud to announce the addition of a new crop monitoring service to their portfolio, in partnership with SatAgro, specifically aimed at the local Agricultural sector. SatAgro has been operational for four years and has been tested and used by many farmers across Europe.
The SatAgro service is very easy to use, accessible via a web-based platform on your PC, tablet or smartphone and it provides a combination of satellite imagery and meteorological data for farmers to visually follow the development of their crops in near-realtime from planting to harvesting.
Figure 1: Explorer allows an overview of the crop growth on selected dates as seen by satellite
Various historical datasets can be displayed as time-series on graphs. More than one meteorological parameter can be displayed simultaneously e.g. rainfall, temperature, growing degree days, etc. and analysed with the development of vegetation.
Figure 2: Graphs allow time-series analyses of crop history and different meteorological measurements
Apart from monitoring the effect of weather and inputs on the health of your plants, SatAgro also provides crop management functionality allowing the grower to perform advanced precision farming activities such as:
- Import and export of various geospatial datasets
- Analyses of historical and current climate parameters
- Comparison of current and historical crop development
- Comparison of different field’s performances
- Evaluation of management strategies on crop development
- Creation of management zones based on different variables
- Facilitate soil sampling activities and integration of soil analysis results
- Generation of variable rate prescription maps for different agricultural inputs including seed, lime and fertiliser
- Transformation and export of VRA maps in vendor specific formats
- Creation of variability maps to enable targeted field scouting exercises
- Activation of automatic alerts for early warning of sudden weather changes and minimizing of crop damage
Figure 3: SatAgro allows the farmer to write his own variable rate application maps
What makes the SatAgro solution unique, is that it allow users to import a wealth of geospatial and empirical information sources including drone imagery, aerial orhophotos, Lidar data, DTM, DSM, contours, automatic weather station data, IoT data such as soil moisture probe data, EC data, soil sampling maps, etc. Furthermore, it allows export of data in a wide range of formats required by leading machinery manufacturers and the consoles that they support.
Figure 4: Southern Mapping uses Lidar to penetrate vegetation and measure both crop- and ground heights
In summary, no matter what you are farming with, SatAgro will enable you to define and exploit the full potential of your fields, optimize and save on seed, fertiliser and plant protection products and as a result ensure unbiased, sustainable crop production for many generations to come. SatAgro forms a powerful tool in the hands of agri-businesses, crop financiers, insurers, co-operatives, input suppliers, agronomists, crop consultants and ultimately the farmer as the most important link in the production of food.
Figure 5: Lidar data, combined with ortho-imagery, provides valuable interpretation of crop growth
The SatAgro platform provides comprehensive and easy-to-understand Help information and User Manuals and it is locally available in both Afrikaans and English.
Southern Mapping would like to invite you to contact us to discuss your unique farming needs.
Contact:
Nic Badenhorst
Agricultural Applications Specialist
Tel: +27 044 150 0004
Mobile: +27 82 782 0533
Email: nic@southernmapping.com
If you have any questions or want to become a featured company on our website to broaden the scope of your business, please send us a mail on info@agri4africa.com.
