As this year’s crop starts to emerge, most farmers are going to walk their fields to see how things are shaping up. But as the crops grow taller and the weather heats up, it becomes near impossible to cover every corner of your fields. And without covering the majority of your acres, it’s hard to get an accurate read of how your crops are progressing, which might leave you open to unwanted surprises later in the season.
Luckily, there is a better way: scouting with guidance from above, specifically NDVI crop health maps. Today, the Satellite Crop Health tool from PROFITLAYERS® can give you a satellite-powered boost, making your scouting more directed and effective. Looking at your fields from a different perspective (from above) will help you better track the health of your crops.
Spot and Address Issues Before They Start
The benefit of NDVI field health imagery is that you can spot and address potential issues with your crop, before they get out of hand. Using data collected by satellites, the Satellite Crop Health tool delivers multiple field imagery types: vegetation health, green biomass, true color, and more.
Each of these layers offers a helpful perspective on the progress of your crops. Our tool filters out clouds and processes the imagery for you, so we can deliver the highest quality and accuracy. Our goal is to make your images best represent the current state of your stands.
Guide Your Scouting
When it comes to scouting, it’s pretty unrealistic to walk through and manage every last acre. Putting the crop health maps to work on your fields will help boost your scouting effectiveness by highlighting areas of immediate interest.
Fields that show patches of lower crop health on the imagery are important areas to inspect first. Using the crop health maps, you can prioritize the right spots in your field, and potentially address issues before they arise.
On the positive side, looking at the field health imagery also helps you determine which areas on your field are performing well. For those areas, quick verification of the satellite imagery is enough to confirm week over week that there aren’t any issues to address.
Tracking Patterns Over Weeks and Seasons
Tracking week over week is what makes this technology so impactful. You can look at images from any point earlier in the year, so as the season continues, you can monitor the growth of your crop from emergence to harvest. To dig even deeper into your field and crop health, go back and look at images from past seasons to understand patterns and trends.
You can even view the imagery right next to other layers such as soil type, soil fertility, rainfall, and warmth on DATA LAYERS™, a companion platform to PROFIT LAYERS®. Combining these data layers together enables you to determine what worked and what didn’t. Guide your scouting, save yourself time, and learn more about your in-season crop performance with the Satellite Crop Health tool!
The Satellite Crop Health tool is part of DATALAYERS™, a companion to our PROFITLAYERS® farm data analysis system. How can we help your operation?
