One Plant to See Them All: Cropler’s Pioneering Approach to Farm Management

For over ten years now, the business community has identified agriculture as the most undigitized industry. By the end of 2023, this scenario has dramatically improved.

Numerous platforms now collect data from agricultural machinery and weather stations. Contributions from drones and satellites like Sentinel and Landsat have significantly expanded the available information. Yet, the question of optimal timing and actions in the field remains critical.

Cropler has been developed to supplement major data from drones and satellites with information obtained directly from plants, irrespective of cloud cover and weather conditions. It helps to reduce scouting time and assists in developing recommendations: it offers smart crop monitoring to assess the state of plants daily and allows farmers and agronomists to track the changes online step by step.

Agricultural Technologies Need a New Round of Modernization

Satellites and drones revolutionized agriculture in their time. With their help, specialists make VRA (Variable Rate Application) maps for applying fertilizers and crop protection products and seeding, even without good yield mapping data. However, several legal, technical, and logistical aspects complicate their use.

Another example includes Farmers Edge which has made grid sampling simpler, cheaper, and more understandable. Based on the collected data, it is possible to determine the amount of vegetative mass in a given area. But unfortunately, despite the undeniable benefits, using these tools also has drawbacks.

The Limitations of Drone Usage in Modern Agriculture

Working with drones requires a lot of time and special technical skills, so there hasn’t been exponential growth in their mass use. More and more companies are emerging that specialize in providing these services on demand, addressing the following challenges individual users often face:

• Drone registration and official permission to operate it.
• Developing missions for flights.
• Coordination of flight plans.
• Providing a stock of 3-4 batteries.
• Time spent preparing a drone and surveying fields.
• Organizing the laborious process of exporting data.

Philip, Cropler's agronomy advisor, also experienced challenges using these devices. Managing such complexities over an area of 16,000 hectares proved daunting, leading to the rejection of this observation method.

The Limitations of Satellite Imaging in Farming

Philip became acquainted with satellite technology back in 2017. It seemed promising at first, but he soon recognized its limitations:

• At the most critical moments, clouds obscured the view of the field, so it was impossible to map the most important indices like NDVI, EVI, and MSI.
• At the same time, radar satellites like Sentinel-1 did not provide the necessary information.
• The last and least critical point is the low resolution (10m² for Sentinel and 30m² for Landsat, which is generally sufficient for building VRA maps).

These unresolved issues forced Philip to travel extensively to view the fields personally.

One day Nikita, Cropler's CEO, proposed to Philip the idea of creating a reliable and affordable multispectral sensor for each field. Philip, drawing from his experience, saw this as a valuable addition to existing tools. The challenge then became optimizing the device's placement and usage for monitoring crop health accurately in any field.

After a series of experiments, they understood that satellite productivity maps (or detailed yield maps) could help to determine the exact locations in the fields where installed sensors would provide the most accurate data on the phenological stage and overall condition of plants in these areas.

Crafting the Cropler Device: A New Era in Farm Surveillance

Philip, as an experienced agronomist, knew the importance of personally inspecting fields to assess plant conditions. His challenge was to extend this inspection beyond easily accessible areas to remote field parts. He relied on satellite maps to identify the most efficient inspection points and necessary actions.

He studied satellite images of the fields growing grain crops, soybeans, corn, canola, cotton, flax, sunflowers, as well as forage crops like clover and alfalfa over several years. He noted a consistent pattern: under normal farming conditions, high productivity zones in fields generally rarely changed. This observation provided a good starting point for determining the location for installing sensors in fields.

During his tenure, Philip meticulously recorded work details and plant phenological stages, took geo-tagged photos, and utilized yield maps from various combine harvesters and high-precision digital elevation models. Despite initial skepticism about accurately determining phenological stages in the field, he observed that areas yielding the highest harvest typically showed more uniform plant development.

These observations and data underpinned the development of the Cropler device for remote crop monitoring. With it, the team learned to identify the most suitable locations for installation, allowing a mere five square meter area analysis to reflect the condition of larger, productive field areas. This aids in determining the optimal timing for agricultural tasks.

Furthermore, the device offers daily NDVI monitoring through its Full HD resolution multispectral sensor and presents visual data through farm management software. It provides more precise vegetation mass growth measurements compared to satellite data.

Pioneering Agricultural Efficiency: Validating the Cropler Device

Cropler studied the methods of determining productivity zones used by leading agrotechnical companies, including:

• Trimble Ag
• Xarvio 
• Granular Insights
• FieldView
• GeoPard Agriculture
• Farmers Edge
• EOS
• Ceres Imaging

In general, their methods of highlighting zones were similar, and Cropler’s team found that the correlation between highlighted zones and yield in the 176 observed fields averaged 0.67, which is quite a high indicator.

To identify more uniform areas in the fields, the team excluded terrain with slopes greater than three degrees. This helped to identify those places where the correlation with yield maps was highest and where stable yield development was observed from year to year.

The first Cropler devices (fully powered by solar energy) were installed in fields in Poland and Ukraine and started plant data collection. Each real-time crop monitoring device has been operating for more than 170 days, sending several photos daily and providing weather data every hour. These findings helped to analyze and improve the technology, creating the Cropler you know today.

Why Cropler Represents the Future of Agricultural Technology

Our approach to agrotechnologies combines simplicity, reliability, and efficiency—qualities that make our field management solutions truly outstanding. Cropler turns out to be not only convenient to use but also economical, especially thanks to reduced fuel costs for field surveys.

With Cropler, you get access to unique data that allows you to see processes in your fields in a new light. Our users have significantly reduced the number of trips, visiting the fields personally only at critical crop development stages to confirm the data obtained from the devices and conduct a more thorough analysis of the field. Thanks to this, they did not miss key phenological stages, starting work at the right time—for example, timely mowing alfalfa and spraying corn.

We are also actively working on algorithms for monitoring moisture deficits, creating a soil moisture sensor. Stay tuned—many exciting innovations await you!