African farmers are using private satellite data to improve crop yields
When EOS first launched in 2015, it relied largely on imagery from a combination of satellites, especially the European Union’s Sentinel-2. But Sentinel-2 has a maximum resolution of 10 meters, making it of limited use for spotting issues on smaller farms, says Yevhenii Marchenko, the company’s sales team lead.
So last year the company launched EOS SAT-1, a satellite designed and operated solely for agriculture. Fees to use the crop-monitoring platform now start at $1.90 per hectare per year for small areas and drop as the farm gets larger. (Farmers who can afford to have adopted drones and other related technologies, but drones are significantly more expensive to maintain and scale, says Marchenko.)
In many developing countries, farming is impaired by lack of data. For centuries, farmers relied on native intelligence rooted in experience and hope, says Daramola John, a professor of agriculture and agricultural technology at Bells University of Technology in southwest Nigeria. “Africa is way behind in the race for modernizing farming,” he says. “And a lot of farmers suffer huge losses because of it.”
In the spring of 2023, when the new planting season was to start, Tope’s company, Carmi Agro Foods, had used GPS-enabled software to map the boundaries of its farm. Its setup on the EOS crop monitoring platform was also completed. Tope used the platform to determine the appropriate spacing for the stems and seeds. The rigors and risks of manual monitoring had disappeared. Hisfield-monitoring officers needed only to peer at their phones to know where or when specific spots needed attention on various farms. He was able to track weed breakouts quickly and efficiently.
This technology is gaining traction among farmers in other parts of Nigeria and the rest of Africa. More than 242,000 people in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe use the EOS crop-monitoring platform. In 2023 alone, 53,000 more farmers subscribed to the service.
