Airbus Defence & Space (Airbus DS), one of the companies of Europe-based aerospace group Airbus, has launched a new service to support precision agriculture around the world. Precision agriculture is an approach to managing crops using remote sensing technologies (airborne and spaceborne), satellite navigational systems and information technology to monitor the development and health of crops in each and every field of a farm.

Airbus DS’s new service is named Verde (‘green’ in Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish). It provides crop analytics, in detail, from satellite imagery, focused accurately on each field and “accurately declouded”. It is a plug-and-play Application Programming Interface for any precision agriculture portal. The company affirms that Verde “provides reliable and quantified measures of the vegetation, consistent over time and space, whatever the satellite used”.

“With Verde, we underline our ambition to become the reference player for precision agriculture portals,” affirms Airbus DS intelligence business head François Lombard. “Both leveraging our wide imagery harvesting and our unrivalled crop analysis capabilities, we are offering a totally different way to derive agronomic information from satellite imagery.”

The main function of the service is to monitor the crop sowing or planting and growing season. It assists with the detection of anomalies, the optimisation of field scouting, seeding, fertilisation, irrigation and crop protection. But it is also of use for ‘off season’ analysis. This is because it can access multi-year analytics series. In consequence, it permits the review of farming strategies, the definition of management zones based on persistent patterns of growth, and the long-term improvement of practices. “Verde targets the entire chain of precision farming consulting providers, from the smallest start-ups to the largest machinists, seeds and fertiliser companies,” says Airbus DS.

Hitherto, precision farming has, with regard to remote sensing, been largely dependent on what is called the Normalised Different Vegetation Index (NDVI). This is calculated using different spectral bands (near-infrared –red/near-infrared +red) from satellite imagery. This provides information on the vegetation. Unfortunately, the NDVI is a relative value, the calculation of which is dependent on the sensor employed, the lighting of the field when the image was acquired and other factors. In sharp contrast, Verde uses biophysical parameters and provides an absolute value that is independent of the sensor. This value can be compared with other calculations made at other times.

Australian agricultural technology company DataFarming has already adopted Verde. DataFarming is based in Toowoomba, Queensland, but provides precision farming services for customers all over the world. “We are looking at expanding our product offering to our 7 500 farm user base, who want more detail about the crop, beyond just the NDVI,” reported DataFarming MD Tim Neale. “Having higher resolution on some of the data is also a key value proposition. This is where Verde fits quite nicely. “We have already processed 4 000 000 ha of the NDVI to date, and want to leverage our user base to offer this valuep-added service. Crops such as cotton, rice and sugar cane will certainly benefit.”

The Verde service is powered by Airbus DS’s OneAtlas digital platform. The company describes OneAtlas as an “industry-leading collaborative environment, designed with and for users to access premium imagery, perform large-scale image processing, extract industry-specific insights and develop the smartest geospatial solutions”