Objectives of the service
Users and their needs
The Customers of NUE-Scope are primarily agricultural input retailers and farmers. Agrii UK, as a UK market leader in ag-retail is our project partner, and our primary initial customer during the project development, testing, and go-to-market phase. Nitrogen is a key input for successful food production but represents one of the biggest input costs to UK farmers. Currently, nitrogen use recommendations are based on insufficient data and lack of sophistication resulting in, on average, only 60% of fertiliser nitrogen being taken up by the crop on average. The remainder is lost to the environment, and this results in significant environmental damage through nitrates and potent greenhouse gases. The ratio of nitrogen applied during crop growth to nitrogen taken up by a crop as part of its final yield is called the Nitrogen Use Efficiency (NUE). Sub-optimal NUE is one of the largest single contributors to environmental damage, contributing 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions per annum. Aside from its environmental impact, the cost of nitrogen fertiliser has soared in recent years by nearly 300% and so efficient use of nitrogen is critical for the sustainable production of food, not just in the UK but globally.
Service/ system concept
Aspia Space will initially deliver the service through its relationship with Origin Digital (already a customer of Aspia Space) and through its sister company Agrii UK, its network of agronomists, advisors, farmers and growers. Agrii UK advises on c.1M hectares of arable land in the UK and is a UK market leader in nutrition agronomy and fertiliser sales. Growers already utilising precision digital farming services (approx. 20% of the total hectares serviced) will be the initial focus of the service, followed by other Agrii and UK farmers. Sales expansion will come through several channels – Agrii using the service as a market differentiator and expanding their digital decision support service delivery, customers of sister company Origin Fertilisers and marketing through trade events, journals and other publications. Initial marketing of the tool will be via the demonstration farms (iFarms & DTFs) in Agrii UK’s network to build confidence in the tool’s accuracy and reliability across a wide geography.
Space Added Value
NUEScope leverages ESA’s Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 platforms. Aspia’s proprietary ClearSky generative AI algorithm transforms Sentinel-1 SAR to the equivalent of Sentinel-2 multispectral optical imagery, free from cloud cover. Opening the time-domain through uninterrupted EO temporal streams, this enables a new approach to regular, reliable crop monitoring at scale, yet resolving change at the 10-metre level. Combined with Aspia’s cutting-edge EarthPT spatio-temporal foundation model (the first and largest GPT-based EO foundation model), NUEScope establishes the causal link between nitrogen application and crop response, and ultimately final yield. Space data enables this application to be deployed at scale, optimising decision making in food production and reducing environmental impacts.
Current Status
The current project status is below:
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We have compiled ClearSky Sentinel-2-like imaging tiles and corresponding SAR tiles covering the area of the NUEScope ground truth data.
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We have successfully pretrained an “EarthPT” 700M parameter foundation model on this compiled dataset. The loss function after our pretraining run is below:
Representative examples of our time series predictions from the foundation model are below:
Where blue points are ground truth labels, and orange points are predictions from EarthPT. The first ten columns are ClearSky bands in the usual ascending wavelength Sentinel 2 order, and the following four columns are SAR bands from Sentinel 1. Each row is a randomly chosen timeseries from the test set.
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We have compiled the dataset for crop type and land type classification, and are now getting this prepared into the correct format for finetuning our foundation model.
Prime Contractor(s)
