Farmers Edge, a global leader in decision agriculture, announces a strategic partnership to bring Planet’s best-in-class global monitoring platform to the Farmers Edge precision agriculture product suite.
Planet is an integrated aerospace and data platform company that operates the world’s largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites, collecting the largest quantity earth imagery. Farmers Edge is now a sole distributor for Planet in key agricultural regions around the world, with the right to use and distribute high-resolution, high-frequency imagery from Planet’s three flagship satellite constellations (RapidEye, Planet “Doves” and the recently acquired SkySat) and other future sensors developed by Planet.
Through this multi-million-dollar, multi-year global distribution agreement, Farmers Edge and Planet are significantly expanding their existing partnership. The companies will deliver the vanguard of remote sensing-driven and analytics-based agronomy services to growers worldwide. Farmers Edge customers will be among the first to take advantage of field-centric, consistent and accurate insights from satellite imagery. While traditional imagery products provide only partial, delayed or inconsistent views of fields, this partnership equips Farmers Edge growers with comprehensive, high-quality field imagery more frequently updated than any other company in the industry.
“Until now, the challenge with satellite imagery was the data was simply not frequent enough to react to crop stress in a timely manner,” says Wade Barnes, president and CEO of Farmers Edge. “At Farmers Edge, providing our customers with the most concise, comprehensive and consistent data is at the core of what we do. We understand the need for more image frequency; that’s why we are partnering with Planet. Daily imagery is a game changer in the digital ag space.”
The combination of Planet’s unprecedented data set and Farmers Edge’s state-of-the-art image processing technology allows for early crop monitoring and gives growers the best opportunity to correct factors that could limit crop performance and compromise yield potential. Growers will now have a wealth of field-centric data updated throughout the growing season, including early monitoring of crop stand, detection of pest and weed pressure, drainage issues, hail damage, herbicide injuries, nutrient deficiencies, yield prediction and more.
“Farmers Edge is consistently at the cutting edge of innovation in agricultural technology, and we’re proud to expand our partnership with them as we work to improve profitability, sustainability and efficiency for the world’s producers,” says Will Marshall, CEO of Planet. “At Planet, we’re committed to providing our partners and customers with imagery that can match the scale of challenges faced by agriculture—a global data set updated every day to help inform real-world, on-farm decisions. We are thrilled to work with Farmers Edge to expand and enhance their offerings to growers around the world.”
“Retailers, co-ops, equipment dealers, agronomists, and all other important advisors to the farmer can now partner with Farmers Edge and leverage this industry-changing capability within their business,” says Ron Osborne, chief strategy officer at Farmers Edge. “We’re pleased to be able to help so many in our industry manage risks in near real time. This is great for our customers, our partners and agriculture.”
In 2016, Planet awarded Farmers Edge its Agriculture Award, recognizing the company’s pioneering work with ag-based analytics, variable rate technology and field-centric data management.