HARVIC Essential | ESA Space Solutions

Objectives of the service

GEO4A offers HARVIC Essential, a marketable, end-to-end, actionable information service for the potato industry on crop-development and quality monitoring, and early forecasting of potato yield during potato growing season. HARVIC Essential gathers all relevant input field parameters and transforms these into quality and quantity Indicators that provide the insights for companies to act upon. HARVIC Essential does not only produces information, but the service will be embedded in the decision making processes from a strategic level to an operational level at customers end.

The services will support optimization of industry operations and guide the business decisions process such as field allocation for early export and maximizing resource logistics. HARVIC Essential will make use of EO-data, combined with in-situ data acquisition and potato growth development modelling to provide near real-time remote-monitoring.

Hermess B.V. serves as external service provider for meteorological data. This service combines numeric model data, weather forecast data, corrected rain radar data, and station measurements resulting in an automatic selection of best available data with highest resolution.

GeoVille GmbH serves as an external service provider for Sentinel 1 and 2 data and will perform data processing for determination of (dynamic) leave area index, leaf colour and emergence data and haulm killing timepoint determination.

Users and their needs

The Feasibility study results confirmed the positive correlation between various vital field parameters, and the potential to develop commercial customized Indicators. In her mid-long-term business strategy, GEO4A is looking to further expand HARVIC Essential by transforming these field parameters in additional Quality Indicators identified in the Feasibility Study based on the specific needs and requirements of customers and users. Overall, GEO4A plans to continuously evolve and further expand HARVIC Essential Services.

Customers in the potato sector focus on having data available faster in the raw potato supply chain to further optimize their business processes. The services offered digest these processes because fewer human actions are required and objective data is collected from the monitored fields. The challenges are on the one hand to move the conservative sector to these new services and within the companies to convert changes to a new way of working instead of applying the existing way of working.

Needs:

Yield estimation (actual & forecast)
Phenological Stages (ie. emergence Date & Haulm Killing Date)
Crop Risk Control (weather related crop stress prediction)
Allocation of fields for certain purposes early in the season

Countries:

Netherlands
Belgium
Luxembourg
Germany

Service/ system concept

The data generated is applied in the three different main departments within the potato industry. An example of the process flow of a growing season is included for support. This goes from scheduling the area to be produced to delivering the produced potatoes to the customer. The data generated from our service tracks the potato growth process at the plot level. During the monitoring of a potato plot, the data can be used, for example, to direct field managers to check on a plot or for the sales department to estimate the expected yield. The data is used as an input parameter within the systems or as a service for the customer. These services partially replace the hitherto manual work within the companies.

Process flow at organizational level

Space Added Value

This DEMO project will combine the strengths of various independent technologies ensuring optimal remote field monitoring and validating HARVIC Essential data and quality field information. HARVIC Essential makes use of automatic processing of optical Sentinel 2 imagery data (L2A, BOA reflectance) to infer crop-growth development parameters. To overcome the impact of cloud coverage on EO-based parameter estimates, we will also make use of SAR (Sentinel 1) satellite imagery to augment the optical crop condition, phenological state and biomass estimates. Due to the differences in wavelengths, different energy/matter interactions, SAR data allows to infer a different type of information compared to optical data, improving the overall understanding of the crop status in the field.

Current Status

After the successful completion of the Feasibility Study, the current DEMO project is now in its Design Phase, updating the user needs and requirements through a series of workshops with clients within the potato markets. The Baseline Design Review has taken place in August 2023. During summer 2023, the system requirements have been designed in order to prepare HARVIC Essential for integration into client environments.

The Critical Design Review took place in December 2023 and paved the path for the ongoing project-tasks. With the support of our champion users and the strategic advices of ESA, we steer into the upcoming growing season 2024 with a motivated and positive mindset to further foster the fully integration of HARVIC Essential data (agri-insights gained from satellite imagery) to core company enterprise resource program (ERP) systems.