Artesian Ventures investee company DataFarming has partnered with international satellite imaging company Pixxel to monitor the health of agricultural crops at increased speed and resolution.
Palo Alto, California and Bangalore, India, based Pixxel launched its latest satellite as part of a SpaceX payload in April and recently raised $US25 million ($36.5 million) in a Series A round to develop further satellites.
Managing director of Toowoomba, Queensland, based DataFarming Tim Neale said: “We have been well serviced by multispectral data for over 20 years, and, in fact, we have 28,000 farms on the DataFarming platform accessing it on a regular basis. However, when we want to dig deeper, there are two main issues: spatial resolution and spectral resolution. As we move into the age of automation and increasing farm size, technology is going to need to fill the gap of determining crop issues earlier; and this is where hyperspectral data parallel research comes in.”
Pixxel says its constellation of hyperspectral satellites has the potential to make agriculture more efficient, sustainable, and automated. Images from its satellites provide 8x more information and 50x better resolution that rival services, Pixxel claims. This allows for in-depth analysis of plant and soil biophysical and biochemical properties, allowing farmers to track these properties over the course of the growing season to improve crop performance.
Pixxel co-founder and chief executive Awais Ahmed said: “This partnership with DataFarming will demonstrate how hyper spectral satellite imagery will revolutionise agriculture by giving farmers access to a new calibre of analytical tools powered by insights from space. Pixxels satellites will help farmers make better and faster decisions by providing a new scale of resolution to the monitoring of crop and soil health.”
DataFarming was established by Tim and Peta Neale in 2017 with the objective of removing barriers to the adoption of digital data in agriculture. The company focuses on delivering simple, automated, low-cost products and services to farmers and agronomists. DataFarming’s digital platform services 40% of Australian grain farms, is used in 50 countries and is among the top five precision agriculture platforms used globally.
Pixxel was founded in 2019 and is an investee of Lightspeed, Radical Ventures, Seraphim Capital, Blume Ventures, Sparta LLC, growX ventures, Inventus Capital and Omnivore Venture Capital as well as high net-worth individual investors including prominent venture capitalists. The company has carried out projects with the Indian Space Research Organisation. NASA JPL, Lockheed Martin and the US Air Force.
Image: Conventional view, left, enhanced DataFarming view, right.