Objectives of the service
Plant protection rules and the risk of spray drift depend on air temperature, relative humidity and wind as they are at the parcel being treated. Commercial forecasts are produced on grids of one to ten kilometres, which is too coarse for that decision. A fixed farm weather station measures real conditions, but at a single point, and cannot follow the machine. Operator judgement works and leaves no record. Large parts of arable land also have no cellular coverage, so operations carried out there are documented on paper, after the event.
HYGO Space addressed both gaps. The project developed a unit fitted to the sprayer that measures conditions at the point of application, integrated a satellite link for areas without cellular coverage, improved the weather information delivered to farmers, and demonstrated the service on ten pilot farms over a full spraying campaign.
Users and their needs
The service addresses arable and root-crop farms, agricultural contractors operating machinery across several holdings, and the cooperatives and advisory organisations that support their members' traceability. France is the core market and the market in which the pilot was run. Ten farms took part in the demonstration, with thirteen tracked sprayers and 143 potato parcels covering 874.2 hectares.
The users are the people who operate the machine and record the work — farmers and the operators employed by farms and contractors. A secondary user is the farm or fleet manager, who needs visibility of where spraying takes place and under which conditions.
Their needs:
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conditions at the parcel, not averaged over a grid cell of several kilometres;
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the hours in the coming days when an application can be made;
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proof of compliance without re-entering information by hand;
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both of the above where there is no cellular coverage.
Service/ system concept
A unit fitted to the sprayer measures air temperature, relative humidity and wind at the point of application, with each reading positioned by satellite navigation. The operator sees those conditions, the recommended application windows and the record of the operation in the HYGO application already used on the farm, rather than in a separate tool.
The system has three parts. The onboard unit integrates the control electronics, satellite positioning, the interface to the measurement equipment and two communication paths: cellular as the primary route, and a satellite link carrying a reduced dataset where cellular coverage is absent, with the complete dataset held in onboard memory and synchronised when the terrestrial link returns. The platform receives the field data and makes them available in the service environment. Two onboard measurements are also used to refine the weather information on which the application windows are assessed.
Space Added Value
Two space assets are used. Satellite navigation positions every measurement and every machine movement, which is what makes a reading attributable to a parcel and an operation reconstructable without manual entry. Satellite communications, provided by Kinéis, carry the data where there is no cellular network.
The second is the differentiating one. Existing approaches — grid forecast applications, fixed farm stations, operator judgement — all fail in the same place: a parcel without cellular coverage produces no record at the time of the operation. The satellite path removes that limit, so measurement and traceability extend to holdings that connected services usually leave out. Parcels without network are common in several large agricultural geographies, which makes this capability a lead argument for the service outside France.
Current Status
The pilot demonstration ran from 1 July to 31 August 2026 on ten farms in France. Ten onboard units were installed across ten different machine and equipment configurations, with no installation failure. Over the two months the service documented 196 field operations covering 3 393.4 hectares, of which 2 793.0 hectares on potato, the target crop. All ten farmers generated detected passages and all ten documented interventions.
No pilot farmer reported an operation that the service had failed to record. The weather information delivered to farmers was improved over the course of the project.
Pilot farmers rated the service 9.5 out of 10.
Prime Contractor(s)
