Boosting market traction for agri-monitoring service
Support from ESA’s Earth observation InCubed commercialisation programme has enabled two companies, GeoVille and EOX, to secure a major contract to provide an Austrian Area Monitoring Service. The consortium’s EO-WIDGET software provides the farming sector with critical satellite-derived information and is a key tool in compliance monitoring for the European Common Agricultural Policy.
Agricultural monitoring has gained ever-increasing attention recently in the face of a major global food crisis and growing concerns over food security. Within Europe, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a fundamental pillar of the continent’s food supply. The CAP now requires national governments to carry out increasingly extensive checks and controls of agricultural production and payment claims from farmers.
Anticipating the vital role that Earth observation would play in enhancing and simplifying subsidy compliance monitoring, in 2017 ESA initiated the Sentinels for CAP (Sen4CAP ) activity in coordination with the European Union. This research and development project focused on providing European institutions with validated algorithms, based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel missions, that address the monitoring needs of the CAP.
From data to dashboard
While Sen4CAP produces valuable information on crops and grassland, it is not designed to be used directly by most end users. GeoVille, a company that has been working on Earth observation applications for over twenty years, recognised the need for a suite of monitoring products that build on the outputs from Sen4CAP to give government agencies exactly the monitoring tools they need to meet their CAP obligations.
To develop the solution, GeoVille worked with fellow Austrian company EOX, a specialist in creating Earth observation web and cloud-based applications.
The result is EO-WIDGET, an application that enables compliance monitoring through an interactive web interface, giving users a range of insights into the state of each crop parcel. There is also a quality assessment tool that reports on CAP compliance performance over an entire territory.
InCubed continues to kick-start commercialisation
ESA’s role in supporting the development of EO-WIDGET was not limited to Sen4CAP, however. The activity received co-funding, technical input and business mentoring via ESA InCubed.
As the Agency’s Earth observation commercialisation programme, InCubed stimulates European commercial space by providing investment opportunities for both start-ups and established companies.
As a result of EO-WIDGET’s market implementation, the GeoVille–EOX consortium has signed a long-term contract with AgrarMarkt Austria (AMA), the national agency for administering CAP payments. The agreement involves supplying tailored services for monthly monitoring of compliance with new CAP regulations and includes extra-high-resolution imagery from multi-satellite fused data for evaluating small parcels of land.
Giuseppe Borghi, the Head of ESA’s Φ-lab, said, “With yet another successful and profitable activity under its belt, InCubed continues to cement its role as an integrator of Earth observation technical and business competencies to support industry in responding to concrete market demands. Fostering the entire innovation pipeline is one of our core values in Φ-lab, and we’re very proud that Sen4CAP and InCubed’s contribution to EO-WIDGET has led to such a prestigious contract award for GeoVille and EOX.”
David Kolitzus, Program Manager in the Agriculture Department at GeoVille, explains the significance of ESA’s backing, “We are excited to be at the forefront of applying Earth observation data for agricultural monitoring within the new regulatory framework and supporting AMA with our products and services.
“The technical blueprint that Sen4CAP offered, in conjunction with the expertise and funding from InCubed, has leant an incomparable level of credibility to EO-WIDGET and given us an enormous helping hand in bringing the product to market.”
“We’ve actually been able to draw on many years of experience working on ESA Earth observation software engineering projects,” comments Stefan Achtsnit, Chief Information Officer at EOX. “This makes us well placed to provide off-the-shelf tooling and operations services for CAP area monitoring.”
Bernhard Eder, Project Manager at AMA adds, “With the developed area monitoring system service, AMA is able to implement the mandatory EU-wide specifications efficiently and purposefully, to use the advantages of the new system and thus contribute to digitisation in agriculture.”
EO-WIDGET’s target customers also include other areas of land surveillance, such as water or forestry, where authorities need monitoring tools to help reduce costs or minimise their environmental impact.
“This new contract is a great outcome for EO-WIDGET and gives ample proof of the viability of the developed solution,” noted ESA data engineer Patrick Griffiths. “ESA’s Sen4CAP activity laid the foundations that enable industry to build customised CAP monitoring capabilities. InCubed’s subsequent support of EO-WIDGET shows how ESA’s research and development activities, together with its commercialisation programmes, can complement each other in facilitating market-ready solutions.”
