Blog SatAgro

A post has been published on the Planet Pulse blog which serves as a symbolic summary of SatAgro’s first decade of operation. During this time, we have learnt a great deal about the needs of farms, ranging from small family-run operations (10+ ha) to very large industrial farms (thousands of ha). This knowledge is reflected in the SatAgro platform as it stands today. We were fortunate that, for most of our journey, we were able to count on the cooperation and support of Planet Labs, whose high-resolution data unlocks the potential to optimise production even on relatively small arable fields….

Prospects for a tough season This year, farmers are facing exceptional pressure from high fertiliser prices which are at their highest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The World Bank forecasts the prices to rise in 2026 by 31%, before easing in 2027. Unfortunately, there is a risk that for late-season crops (maize, sugar beet and potatoes), another drought could exacerbate the difficult situation. Leading weather and climate modelling centres on both sides of the Atlantic – the ECMWF and NOAA, agree that an El Niño event is likely to occur between May and July 2026. There is also…

Two-way communication with machinery Agriculture 4.0 – a marriage of precision agriculture with digital technologies, has recently been discussed intensively, in particular in connection with the first edition of the funding programme in this area , targeting farms. The programme is supported from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. In this busy period, the SatAgro team associates “Agriculture 4.0” above all with the ‘two-way wireless communication’ – by now quite a famous term among Polish farmers, about which we receive hundreds of enquiries. It’s first component, ‘The first direction’, is the transmission of instructions, primarily agrochemical application maps, from the…

The year 2024 was the warmest on record (measurements started around the mid-19th century). The trend of increasing temperatures, decreasing snow cover, and accelerated evapotranspiration was further compounded by the El Niño climate-ocean anomaly, which resulted in extreme events in many parts of the world – from drought and fires in the Amazon to catastrophic rainfall in Spain and our country. By default, any soil water deficits which has formed during the summer droughts, by spring will reset themselves due to autumn and winter rainfall and snowfall, and decreased evaporation and water consumption by the diminished living plant biomass. This…

It’s been ten seasons, a decade!, since SatAgro went online. During this time, we have managed to create from scratch a platform that is well recognised in Poland and has a very interesting track record of digitizing hundreds of farms, satellite monitoring and crop optimization. This alone is a good reason to celebrate, but this year is also special for us because we have returned to a pathway of growth after a difficult two years. Previously, after seven seasons of rapid growth, we hit a low point. The main causes of the slowdown were the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by Russia’s…