Objectives of the service
Our mission is to help farmers minimize food loss whilst increasing farmers’ revenue and profits through ensuring harvest is carried out at the right time and in the right location. By optimizing on-farm planning and operations, farmers will increase their revenue, without engaging in activities that further depletes soil quality and biodiversity on both own-operated and surrounding lands. To reach this goal, we are developing a software for harvest planning using input data from earth observation (EO) data and location services data (GNSS), combined with weather data and in-situ verification. The harvest planning software will take into account the different variations in terrain, weather, soil, and machinery, and route the resources to locations where it matters most for the bottom line.
Users and their needs
Clients
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Large industrial farms - we are targeting large industrial farms that will use our service to optimize their harvest and increase their revenue
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Cooperative management - cooperatives will be able to track the progress of the farms in the cooperatives that use our software and better predict the outcome of the harvest, as well as the scheduling and geographical distribution of harvest .
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Large cooperative member-farms - for all intents and purposes with the same operational challenges as industrial farms.
Users
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Technical managers - technical managers will use our service to have an immediate overview and to be able to allocate the resources in the most efficient manner. Operations managers can function as technical managers, both for smaller units and larger operations.
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Field workers - will be able to use our service to get immediate updates and know how to prioritize their work
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Lab technicians - will use our software in relation to their work with analytics hardware such as Foss. We integrate with hardware providers for automatic or semi-automatic data transfer to ATKINS.
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Corporate level (CFO / CEO / COO) will use our service to get an overview of the progress in real-time
Service/ system concept
We currently have two main services:
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Data capture. Our data capture tool is an incremental solution to effectively digitise plant development monitoring, which is an existing process for most growers. The current industry practice is to capture data either by hand or in spreadsheets. We introduce this solution into an existing market for analog and semi-digital services.
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Harvest planning. By leveraging plant development data we provide highly accurate early yield estimations. We can then provide a range of harvests and logistics optimisation services using these estimations as a starting point. This solution represents a novel solution in a new market.
Space Added Value
Space assets from the Sentinel and MODIS satellites can support multiple aspects of Sensonomic’s solution for computer aided harvest planning. Satellite data can provide canopy cover, temperature, and solar radiation inputs to process-based crop growth models to simulate historical production values for agricultural producers lacking data. Simulated production data can be related to historical meteorological and pollen emission data to develop statistical models for predicting future harvest weight to facilitate long-term planning of harvest resources before the harvest season. Satellites can also offer weather data at higher spatial resolutions than meteorological stations which can increase the accuracy of statistical models predicting crop maturation for short-term planning of when and where to deploy harvest resources. Finally, satellite data can be used to detect the extent and timing of harvest to validate or potentially replace ground based harvest reporting. Awareness of how harvest is progressing can guide decisions about where to harvest next or intervene to speed up the harvest process.
Current Status
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Completed initial market research for seven countries and three crops.
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Interacted with two specialised consultancies for multi-crop systems in Chile and Peru, and coffee in Brazil.
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Interviewed five agri-focused investors for asset management purposes.
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Analysed size and density of 120 olive producers in Spain and Portugal.
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Identified 10+ attractive targets for grape production in Latin America
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Identified 10 attractive targets for coffee production in Brazil.
