Airbus Extends Its Reach Into Precision Agriculture Solutions With AgNeo

Airbus announced on 6 March 2020 that it has launched AgNeo, its new integrated precision farming solution for commodity and permanent crops. Delivering in-season actionable information based on satellite imagery and premium agronomic analytics, AgNeo will help customers save time, optimise inputs, and increase yields.

This new product leverages Airbus’ 30-year experience in the agriculture market and the long-standing and fruitful collaboration with its customers to propose a wide range of crop analytics. Based on imagery-derived health maps from SPOT, Pléiades, Sentinel-2, and Landsat 8 data, they support a wide range of capabilities: from alerting features that direct agronomists to scout areas in their fields that require immediate attention, to the creation of management zones and variable rate application maps. Thanks to an Airbus-proprietary processing chain that normalizes data across all sensors, AgNeo customers can also derive absolute agronomic indicators to use as input to their own models for building nitrogen recommendation or establishing water budgets.

AgNeo also provides enhanced analytics for high value permanent crops such as almonds, apples, and grapes. Using 50cm resolution data from Pléiades, AgNeo creates a mask of all the tree crowns to remove noise from background vegetation and soil, improving the results and bringing analytics to the tree level. These analytics include a stand count inventory eliminating time-consuming and error-prone manual tree counts. The product will be able to utilise 30cm data from Airbus’ new Pléiades Neo satellites due to be launched later this year.

The AgNeo solution is available with a full user interface and will also be accessible via APIs.