Abelio Leading the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture with Planet Insights Platform

In the face of increasing food demand, larger farm sizes, tightening regulations, and limited resources, agricultural producers are under pressure to optimize every aspect of their operations. Abelio, a leader in precision agriculture in France, has developed a crop monitoring solution designed to empower farmers, cooperatives, and agricultural distributors with the tools they need to make informed, sustainable decisions. By gathering data from various reliable sources, including PlanetScope imagery, and applying powerful algorithms and AI models, Abelio generates time-sensitive insights that are critical during the short growing season.

One of the key challenges for farmers is managing the tight timelines dictated by plant growth cycles. Missing even a few days of data can lead to suboptimal decisions, especially during cloudy seasons. This is where Abelio’s partnership with Planet comes into play. “Before partnering with Planet, farmers often had to rely on satellite imagery that was updated only every five days,” explained Samuel Bonnard, Head of International Business Development at Abelio. “This meant that cloud cover could obscure the fields for up to two weeks, leaving farmers in the dark. With PlanetScope’s near-daily imagery, we can provide the resolution and frequency needed to offer precise recommendations, helping farmers make timely decisions.”

Optimizing Nitrogen Use for Wheat Crops

Nitrogen is a vital nutrient for wheat crops, directly impacting crop yield and quality. However, excessive nitrogen use can harm the environment, leading to air and water pollution, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. Abelio’s solution addresses this issue by enabling farmers to apply nitrogen more precisely, reducing environmental impact while maintaining or even increasing crop yields. “Nitrogen accounts for 40% of the carbon footprint of a farm,” Bonnard noted. “Our solution helps farmers reduce nitrogen use by 5-10% on average.”

Before Abelio’s solution, farmers calculated the minimum amount of nitrogen in one field and would apply the same amount of nitrogen across all their fields, leading to inefficiencies and waste. Abelio’s variable rate mapping approach allows farmers to tailor nitrogen application to the specific needs of each zone within a field. This saves money and prepares farmers for the Farm to Fork Strategy under the EU Green Deal that mandates a significant reduction in nitrogen use by 2030 and accelerates transition to a sustainable food system. 

Early adopters of Abelio’s smart farming solution are already seeing positive results. A large corn producer in France reported a 96% satisfaction rate after using the service, with a 7% reduction in nitrogen use and a 5% increase in yield, translating to nearly 50 euros in additional profit per hectare.

With the help of Planet’s near-daily imagery and Planet Insights Platform, Abelio can quickly regenerate maps and provide farmers with up-to-date recommendations, optimizing yields, reducing nitrogen use, and helping to ensure compliance with environmental regulations.

Streamlining Data Analysis with Planet Insights Platform

Abelio’s evolution from a Planet customer to a partner highlights the growing importance of data in agriculture. By leveraging the Planet Insights Platform, Abelio has streamlined its data analysis process, becoming more efficient and productive. The platform allows Abelio to scalably process satellite data to train into its AI models, enabling the creation of precise agronomic models for biomass and chlorophyll content based on real-time field observations.

“Using Planet Insights Platform, we can retrieve satellite data from our customers’ plots quickly and easily,” explains Bonnard. “This API has allowed us to fully automate our service and run it in the cloud with a serverless architecture, significantly reducing our development time and costs.”

The collaboration with Planet has accelerated Abelio’s ability to build and deploy solutions, providing their customers with a responsive, continuously available service that leverages the latest data to inform decision-making. Abelio currently supports customers in France, and is testing in Canada, Australia, and Spain to provide farmers around the world solutions to optimize their agricultural operations, reduce their environmental impact, and make farmers’ lives easier.