Menlo Park, California, March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nowadays, the US, being historically strong in individual farming, is steadily moving towards the increasing number of agricultural cooperatives. Within the last five years, the agri-coops market soared from $6.5 billion to more than $200 billion in net sales, and it keeps growing. Iowa, Minnesota, and California are the states where most of the leading agricultural cooperatives reside — cumulatively, 81 of the Top 100 agri-coops generate around $33 billion of sales.
The reason why farming cooperatives are gaining popularity can be easily explained. These organizations aim at helping all members reach better yields and profit by connecting farmers to distributors, assisting in purchasing necessary supplies, and providing consultancy services. Moreover, being surrounded by a like-minded community ready to stretch a helping hand, farmers can be more sure to achieve their production and economic goals.
Since precision farming is advancing, promoting a sustainable approach to agribusiness, agri-coops have become interested in employing remote sensing technologies in daily farming operations. EOS Data Analytics, an expert in satellite-powered field management solutions, offers agricultural cooperatives practical tools to handle various crop growing issues.
Traditionally, agri-coops relied on manual information gathering as to the state of crops by regular field trips and vegetation growth observations. However, this costly and time-consuming approach can hardly provide comprehensive data for effective decisions since it cannot encompass the farm management in its complexity. There should be an in-depth historical analysis of fields productivity, crop rotation, and weather patterns to avert crop diseases or predict a farm’s yielding capacity. Thus, a lack of accurate data may result in inappropriate decisions hampering the crop growing process.
Another challenge agri-coops are facing is an inaccurate estimation of fertilizers needed to boost soil fertility. The excessive use of fertilizers inhibits soil microbial diversity and leads to soil degradation, whereas insufficient nurturing may result in crop loss and low yields. Moreover, from the organizational perspective, it’s often a problem when members of the same cooperative utilize different farm management software, which results in miscommunication and difficulties making agreed decisions. One of the solutions to these problems is implementing a unified platform providing all agri-coop members with reliable data-driven information on crops.
EOS Crop Monitoring, an online satellite-based precision agriculture platform designed for remote farm management, covers large field areas with satellite imagery providing valuable insights on crop growing. The data retrieved from satellite images help detect and timely eliminate various anomalies threatening crop development.
“Utilizing rich platform’s capabilities, farmers can address crop diseases, weed spread, pest attacks, heat and cold stress, excessive or insufficient irrigation and fertilizing, and many other obstacles growers may face on their way to better yields. In addition, EOS Crop Monitoring allows agri-coops to be more financially steady by cutting costs on frequent field trips for problem zones detection — it became possible thanks to the scouting feature enabling agri-coops to send scouts to physically check the questionable areas”, says Brijesh Thoppil, Director of Strategic Partnerships at EOS Data Analytics.
The list of the platform’s features is big enough to choose what fits the most every farming cooperative’s needs.
Here are the functionalities that will help improve crop growing results and streamline farm operations:
- Zoning. Usually, different field areas are not evenly productive, thus, requiring differential approaches to fertilizing. Zoning allows farmers to calculate the necessary amount of fertilizers based on the plots’ cropping ability and historical productivity.
- Vegetation indices. Vegetation indices, created with mathematical algorithms, inform about the state of vegetation and soil to timely adjust agricultural activities.
- Weather data. Historical weather patterns let agrarians assume what to expect from the weather within a certain season. At the same time, a 14-day weather forecast helps plan field activities without risks of being caught up by unfavorable weather conditions.
- Scouting. When the platform’s analytics shows an alarming picture, the best way is to see the situation with your own eyes. Scouting tasks help determine problematic areas to be inspected during field trips, keeping scouts and farmers in touch on the assignment progress and results.
- Field leaderboard. This dashboard presents all fields at once, displaying important characteristics that can be sorted by crop field size, sowing data, vegetation index, etc.
- Team management. An agricultural cooperative unites many members who, ideally, should seamlessly collaborate. The team management feature enables information sharing between coop members and ensures the data are accurate and reliable.
EOS Data Analytics Partner Program offers several partnership options for agricultural cooperatives.
- The out-of-the-box EOS Crop Monitoring platform for 5,000+ ha subscriptions with a dedicated account manager to support along the way.
- Simple or Advanced White Label — white label EOS Crop Monitoring platform implies full customization opportunity. The advanced solution includes corporate branding, custom-tailored reporting scheme, and a scouting mobile app.
- Custom solutions include but are not limited to crop classification, yield prediction, and field boundaries detection using AI and machine learning models powered by satellite images.
By implementing EOS Crop Monitoring in daily farming operations, agri-coops will get a chance to enforce their traditional agricultural practices with earth observation technologies and boost farms’ productivity.
“EOS Crop Monitoring functionality — and these are numerous features developed by seasoned scientists and IT experts — is created with farmers in mind. Vegetation indices, weather forecasts and historical patterns, zoning, scouting will tremendously help agrarians timely detect crop growing threats and eliminate them without compromising yields,” adds Brijesh Thoppil, Director of Strategic Partnerships at EOS Data Analytics.
Using the platform brings sustainable results that translate into agri-coops productivity and profitability growth. EOS Data Analytics keeps enhancing the EOS Crop Monitoring service to ensure growers have all the necessary tools to push the limits and bring more agricultural products to the market. The company also has far-going plans to boost the US agri-coops sector and introduce more farming communities to satellite-based technology.
