EarthDaily Agro and Infopulse Help a Large Ukrainian Agro-holding Access Precision Agriculture

Aiming to enable data-driven decisions and ensure more efficient use of its resources, one of the leading industrial agro-holdings in Ukraine decided to adopt the precision agriculture approach. The company’s primary objective was to engineer a modern cloud-based data platform that would gather, consolidate, and analyze vast volumes of agricultural data, including high-resolution satellite images of its crop fields. In 2022, the agricultural giant announced a tender to purchase satellite monitoring data, namely maps of vegetation heterogeneity across its farmlands.

EarthDaily Agro was selected among peer Earth observation data processing companies due to its robust capabilities in satellite-based remote sensing and in-depth expertise in providing scientific-grade data on agricultural areas across the globe.

Infopulse was chosen as the key IT services provider due to its 15+ years of experience in business intelligence & data management services and a comprehensive portfolio of 50+ successful BI projects for Agriculture, BFSI, Retail, Healthcare, and other industries.

Business Challenge

After assessing the client’s IT environment, source systems, and data models, Infopulse proceeded with end-to-end engineering of a modern data platform based on Microsoft Azure, which would aggregate and process the Earth observation data supplied by EarthDaily Agro. The Azure-based data platform was integrated with the proprietary data analytics solution of EarthDaily Agro – “Geosys” via APIs, thus enabling the gathering and analysis of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) variability maps. However, considering the scale of the client’s business, which spans thousands of crop fields across Ukraine, NDVI variability maps were not enough to fully meet the company’s goals in terms of resource optimization, agricultural productivity, and risk management.

For this reason, Infopulse and EarthDaily Agro initiated a series of discussions with the client and proposed to enhance the data platform with a range of advanced capabilities.

“We were eager to offer more sophisticated, yet promising ideas to drive precision agriculture across thousands of crop fields, and pleased to see the client’s enthusiasm about their implementation” – Yuriy Pekun, Project Manager Lead, EarthDaily Agro

Solution

Infopulse and EarthDaily Agro helped the client extend the data platform with a broad spectrum of innovative features that enable smart precision agriculture, such as:

• Continuous provisioning of NDVI maps with full coverage of each field to assess the variability of crops during the entire growing season.
• Precise relief maps that provide additional insights into the vegetation development across each crop field.
• Vegetation data benchmarking: custom algorithms for daily crop monitoring and detection of vegetation deviations.
• Hot spots that indicate field areas with the highest changes in vegetation.
• Division of crop fields into productivity zones to determine optimal locations for gathering and analyzing soil samples.

In addition, EarthDaily Agro supplied accurate weather data to the client, including the precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, snow depth, and solar activity data gathered during the last 30 years – from area-specific to continent-level insights. All of these variables helped the client’s agronomists to better understand how weather patterns and climate change impact crop yields on both local and regional scales. Ultimately, the quality of the supplied weather data exceeded the client’s expectations, as it was almost fully identical to the proprietary data gathered from the client’s weather monitoring stations across various regions in Ukraine. 

Results

The Azure-based data platform developed by Infopulse, combined with top-quality data delivered by EarthDaily Agro has helped the client reap the unparalleled benefits of precision agriculture.

As a result, the agricultural giant received the following benefits:

• A single source of truth, which stores, aggregates, imports, and extracts large volumes of agricultural data across diverse systems in near-real time.

• Significantly reduced production costs due to well-timed fertilization and crop protection activities, as well as proper sowing dates and crop density planning in different farmland zones.

• Streamlined crop field management and planning enabled by the analysis of NDVI values across the farmlands, as well as custom features that monitor changes in vegetation (field productivity zones, indication of vegetation hot spots, data benchmarking, etc.)

• Enhanced business productivity due to advanced BI capabilities and precision agriculture reports that bring in-depth insight into the planned/done crop operations.

• Optimized time and costs through continuous, fully automated weather data analytics across thousands of crop fields. Previously, the weather data analysis required 3+ days of manual work. Now the client receives updated weather insights 4 times per day (which can be scaled to near real-time weather data analytics), as well as predictive analytics for the next 6 hours.

• Improved risk management due to weather records for the past 30 years supplied by EarthDaily Agro, which allows analyzing weather dynamics and mitigating potential climate change impacts.

“Thanks to the utmost professionalism, in-depth IT expertise, and effective communication of the Infopulse team we managed to carry out this ambitious project for one of Ukraine’s leading agricultural enterprises. EarthDaily Agro sees Infopulse as a reliable and inventive IT partner, and we are looking forward to future collaboration on new daring digital transformation projects that may reinvent the agriculture industry” – Yuriy Pekun, Project Manager Lead, EarthDaily Agro

“Infopulse was fortunate to forge a valuable strategic partnership with EarthDaily Agro amidst the global shift to digitized, smart, and sustainable agriculture. The developed solution emerged as a robust data powerhouse, and a gateway to precision farming for the client, all thanks to the proactiveness, ingenuity, and geo-analytics proficiency of the EarthDaily Agro team. We are excited to continue breaking new grounds and engineering the future of agriculture together with EarthDaily Agro”. – Serhii Kovalenko, Engagement Manager, Infopulse  

About EarthDaily Agro

EarthDaily Agro is an agriculture-focused division of EarthDaily Analytics, providing high-quality satellite imagery and geo-analytics to agricultural companies worldwide. From regional to field-level, our expertise in geographic information systems provides the scalability of a global platform while our presence in the major agricultural countries enables localized solutions.

Learn more at: https://earthdailyagro.com

Contact EarthDaily Agro for any additional information.

About Infopulse

Infopulse, part of the leading Nordic digital services company Tietoevry, is an international vendor of services in the areas of Software R&D, Application Management, Cloud & IT Operations, and Cybersecurity to SMEs and Fortune 100 companies across the globe. Founded in 1991, the company has a team of over 2,000 professionals and is represented in 7 countries across Europe and the Americas.

Learn more at: https://www.infopulse.com

Contact Infopulse for any additional information.