How Granular Delivers Fast, Frequent, In-Field Insights to Farmers

As farms continue to digitize their operations, farmers are increasingly able to blend intuition and expertise with data from new sensors that capture subtle changes in the field. Planet’s long-standing partner Granular is at the forefront of this agtech revolution, building new analytic tools to help farmers increase yields and manage risk with help from satellite imagery.

One of their flagship solutions, Granular Insights, is a key example. Leveraging high-frequency PlanetScope imagery, the platform quickly analyzes the health of crops during the growing season, notifying farmers of in-field change. If there are deviations from expected crop growth, the farmer can better direct scouting efforts to make the right interventions at the right time.

Assisting farmers to take the right action across thousands of acres of farmland, requires both scale and speed. Granular currently analyzes over 600,000 fields across the globe, crunching large amounts of satellite data every day in order to deliver actionable insights to the farmer. Without this information, farmers are stuck with manual, time-consuming processes to monitor crop health, or worse, they miss key information and suffer productivity losses.

Given that time is of the essence during the growing season, Granular depends heavily on Planet’s cloud-based API infrastructure to tap into the power of high-frequency, global satellite imagery. Each week, they download upwards of one million images for crop health analysis. With the newly launched Orders API, they can do so much more efficiently. 

“With the new Orders API, this growing season we are processing satellite imagery for over 600,000 fields, delivering imagery-based insights to farmers all over the globe,” said Rachel Balik of Granular. 

Planet’s new Orders API allows customers to order, process and deliver hundreds of images simultaneously, enabling more efficient ingestion and processing of data. To get historical imagery for as many as 13,000 fields a day, Granular uses the clipping feature to download only the specific fields they wish to analyze (as opposed to the full captured scene), reducing their computation and storage costs. Finally, Granular delivers that data straight to their chosen cloud storage location, enabling them to focus resources on analysis and deliver imagery to the application that farmers use in the field.  

Reach out to our team to learn about the Orders API and how high-frequency Planet imagery can power the next wave of digital transformation in agriculture.