Satellite imagery is transforming modern agriculture. Farmers and agribusinesses use observations from space to monitor crop development, detect stress, optimize irrigation and fertilizer use, and forecast yields — all without setting foot in the field. But the image a farmer sees in an agricultural app is almost never a direct product of a satellite operator. It is the end result of a complete Earth observation ecosystem in which several different kinds of organizations each do one part of the job.

Four steps: a satellite photographs the Earth, a data provider stores and shares that picture, an insights company (that's us) turns it into an answer, and the farmer acts on it in the field.

The Four Layers of the Ecosystem

Every field map a farmer looks at has quietly passed through four hands. Knowing who does what makes the whole industry much easier to read — and explains why the company that flies a satellite is rarely the company whose app you open.

Types of Satellites

Not all satellites see the world the same way. Agriculture mostly relies on three sensing approaches — optical, radar, and hyperspectral. Each has a different superpower and a different blind spot, which is why serious monitoring usually combines them.

Optical satellites — the "camera in space"

Optical satellites work like a very high-flying digital camera. They rely on sunlight bouncing off the ground and measure how much light comes back in different colour bands, including some the human eye can't see (like near-infrared). Healthy plants reflect a lot of near-infrared light, so by comparing bands we can measure crop vigour with indices like NDVI. This is the workhorse of precision agriculture — great for crop health, greenness, and yield estimation.

The catch: optical sensors need daylight and a clear sky. Clouds block the view entirely, so in cloudy regions or rainy seasons you can go weeks without a usable image.

Radar (SAR) satellites — seeing through clouds and darkness

Radar satellites, more precisely Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), don't rely on sunlight at all. They send down their own microwave pulses and listen for the echo that bounces back. Because microwaves pass straight through clouds and work in the dark, SAR can image a field at any time of day, in any weather — the exact situations where optical sensors fail. What comes back tells us about structure and moisture rather than colour: soil wetness, crop biomass, flooding, and field boundaries.

The trade-off is that radar imagery isn't a pretty photo. It has no natural colour and is harder to interpret by eye, and it says little about plant chemistry. In practice, SAR is the perfect partner to optical: it fills the cloudy gaps and adds moisture and structure that a camera can't see.

Hyperspectral — the specialist chemist

Where an optical camera sees a handful of broad colour bands, a hyperspectral sensor slices the light into hundreds of very narrow ones. That fine detail lets it read subtle chemical signatures — nutrient deficiencies, specific crop diseases, or plant species — that ordinary optical sensors blur together. It's the specialist of the group: powerful for research and precise diagnostics, but the data is heavier and, for now, missions like EnMAP and PRISMA are aimed mainly at scientific use rather than everyday farming.

Data Access: Making Imagery Usable

A data provider does not need to own the satellites it distributes. The distinction matters:

Data providers add value by handling atmospheric correction, cloud masking, tiling, and delivery through accessible APIs — tasks that would otherwise require significant technical infrastructure from every downstream user.

Which Satellites Exist, and Who Operates Them

With the sensing types in mind, it helps to know the actual missions behind the imagery — and, just as importantly, who owns them versus who distributes them. The landscape splits neatly into two camps.

On one side are the public, government-funded missions: the European Union's Copernicus Sentinels (operated by ESA), NASA and USGS's Landsat and MODIS, and national science missions like Germany's EnMAP (DLR) and Italy's PRISMA (ASI). Their imagery is generally free and open, which is why so much of agriculture is built on Sentinel-2 and Landsat.

On the other side are the commercial operators that sell higher-resolution or on-demand imagery: Planet (PlanetScope and SkySat), Vantor — the operator formerly known as Maxar Intelligence — flying the WorldView constellation, Airbus (Pléiades Neo), and radar specialists ICEYE and Capella Space. These are typically accessed through the operator's own platform or authorized distributors, under a paid licence.

The table below brings it all together: each mission, its sensing type, who operates it, where you can actually get the data, and whether it's free or commercial.

Satellite Missions and Data Access — Full Reference Table