Irish agri-services group Origin Enterprises has launched a new digital satellite platform called Rhiza, which will map tillage and dairy farms across Europe using satellites in space.

Origin’s new platform will allow the company to image farms from space and provide farmers with data around crop health, yield predictions, local weather patterns as well as disease and pest decision support tools.

The new Rhiza platform will have a starting cost of £0.50/ha (€0.58/ha) for farmers, which will include boundary mapping, georeferenced cropping, hyperlocal weather and Origin’s existing Contour app. Additional services can be added to the platform with prices rising to £2/ha (€2.33/ha) for the Rhiza plus option and £3/ha (€3.50/ha) for the Rhiza pro.

The Rhiza precision option, which includes farm planning and variable rate application maps, is the most expensive option for farmers and starts off at £3.60/ha (€4.20/ha). The price can increase depending on the level of sophistication required by the farmer or agronomist.

Origin says it already images around 2m acres across Europe for farmer customers, providing farmers and agronomists with real-time imagery on crops and fields.

The company says the Rhiza platform will work off imagery from the Planet constellation of satellites, which has over 150 satellites in the sky and provides optical imaging that has a resolution that is nine times higher than other providers.

Fresh images

The partnership with Planet will also allow Rhiza to capture fresh images of fields every 1.5 days compared to standard satellite platforms which take seven days.

Origin said it will also tap into the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel satellites to provide farmers with all-weather synthetic aperture radar (SAR) monitoring, from which Origin derives its crop growth models.

Launched last week at the ESA headquarters in Harwell, UK, Origin said it will initially focus on the UK market with its n1ew Rhiza platform but plans to roll out the system to farms in central and eastern Europe, where the company provides large-scale agronomy services for farmers.