#189 The Power of Satellite Data in Revolutionizing Agriculture, Forestry and More With Alexander Kravchenko

0:00:03 - Mehmet
Hello again to the CTO show with Mehmet, and today I'm very pleased to have with me Alex. Alex, thank you very much. The way I do it usually is I like my guests to introduce themselves. So, alex, can you tell us a little bit about you and your company? 

0:00:21 - Alex
Yeah, hello, mehmet Hi to all the listeners here. It's an honor actually to be here and I hope we'll have an insightful conversation. I'm a deputy CPO at EOS Data Analytics, but before I tell about what I've been doing, what I'm doing now, I would prefer to tell more about the company I work into, to give a proper association between me and my company. So EOS Data Analytics is a global provider of AI powered satellite imagery analytics used for commercial and scientific purposes. We have developed our web-based platforms to monitor mainly the farmlands and forest areas around the globe. Our products are based on satellite data, ai, big data analytics and use of proprietary algorithms. 

Currently, eos Data Analytics serves customers and partners from 20 plus verticals with bespoke solutions to meet their challenges. Our main mission is to harness the power of satellite technologies to provide businesses with fast and accurate data driving decisions. We also commit to sustainability in all its manifestations. We know that the technical global challenges are a task that requires combined efforts from everyone, from individuals to governments and large scale corporations. So we bring technological expertise to the table, generating actionable satellite driving insights into how can we make the world a better place to gather and how we can influence the factors that negatively impact sustainability. 

And our main product in the agriculture industry is the crop monitoring platform, an online satellite field monitoring service that collects all the important information about the state of crops in one, two, and it is worth mentioning here that we have worked with commercial and free data sources and realized that we do not have sufficient data to cover our needs or needs of our customers. 

And now we've come to realize that the adding our own satellite data would bring great additional value to us, and that led us to the decision to launch our own constellation and the first EOS Set. One satellite is already operating on low earth orbit, and additionally we have the forest monitoring Online tool and the land viewer products. Just few words about those. The forest monitoring is a web platform that uses automated remote Sensing data processing tools to analyze this data forest, which reduces the cost of sustainable business development in the forest sector. And the land viewer is an online platform that aggregates and Resells satellite images from multiple providers and allows on-the-go searching, processing, getting valuable insights from satellite data to tackle real business issues. So I hope this discovers the company Overview. We could sit here and talk hours about this one. 

0:04:05 - Mehmet
Yeah. 

0:04:07 - Alex
Yeah and like to fulfill it was my presence here. I can tell a few words about who am I, what am I doing here? 

0:04:15 - Mehmet
How did I Get here in the space industry in this great yeah, yeah, actually this was my next question to you, alex, like because space is something very interesting. So how did you end up actually Working in in satellite images? And you know there's a space industry in. 

0:04:34 - Alex
Yeah, actually, if we look backwards a bit, my professional path was quite specific due to being uncommon, compared to some guys who appear in IT, especially in the space domain story. I started from journalism. I was an editor in chief and one, yeah, and one of the most trusted that news agencies in Ukraine. But at some point and I was getting bored because everything was fine due to what I've rebuilt there and this was a trigger to try out something new so I shifted to the IT industry. Almost Around eight years ago. I Was working on several existing businesses in the trade shows industry and launched couple startups like image mate matchmaking tool for business events worldwide and the platform for online events, a similar to. Maybe no helping to. Maybe you've heard about these guys. 

0:05:28 - Mehmet
Yeah they're. 

0:05:28 - Alex
We passed the biggest Asian business accelerator, china X layer and much more Stuff to get my experience extended, but nevertheless I've been working, working for new opportunities. So almost three years ago I joined the great company professionals keen on remote sensing and the space industry it's actually EOS data analytics and diving deeper into product development Methodologies, business operations, people management, I realized that there is a vast space for corporate innovation and I started to help build the company inside out and pure update. An opportunity to participate in a double US space accelerator, enabling me and my company to immerse in vast process of collaboration and business development. And currently, as you have mentioned or I have mentioned that remember I'm a deputy Cpo and the product manager at the same time in EOS da, involved in many streams, including our flagship product drop and touring a top-notch precision farming tool. Here I lead one of the product teams and I'm also responsible for the white label program which we offer to our customers. Product operations scale up initially is an involved in company white strategic streams and much more great, alex. 

0:06:49 - Mehmet
Now I Want to ask you this question. You know any product is out there to solve a Solve a problem, right so? Or let's say it's a to to make some challenges easier, right so, when it comes to to satellite imagery, you know what are, you know the, the benefits, I would say, or what it make it like. You know Some product which is appealing to. You mentioned the agriculture and you mentioned forestry, right, industries, yeah, so can. Can you tell me more about? You know the use cases and what it make it fit for them? 

0:07:28 - Alex
Yeah, we constantly analyze the needs of our target customers across various verticals and and allocate the main challenges which arise in front of them. Let's say in front of farmers yeah, the main goal is to achieve larger yields with minimal resource waste. In here we have got the vast set of variables which have the greatest impact on the final yields. And when we talk about those farmer use cases, challenges and the outcomes that they can benefit from using our software, we help farmers, agriculture cooperatives, ag enterprises, input suppliers, bank, insurance companies and their other verticals to manage multiple fields, cut costs on resources and make reliable decisions. So this is these are like the key points Invest less and get more yields in in terms of the yields itself and in terms of money. 

So, it's also about timely awareness of major crop hazards, like we have reliable weather forecast and supplementary data with a grade of 1990 meters. We have soil moisture content, allowing to cut costs on expensive sensors. Stress plants identification after extreme weather conditions is also integrated to the platform, which allows to combine several factors and data sources to to detect those stress plants and make timely decisions. Our plan solutions allow to identify damage, damage by pests and diseases, powered by an extensive set of indices with vegetation, vegetation change notifications and etc. Etc. Also we can like Say about highly efficient cost of the machines, optimization with variable rate, application maps for extensive inputs, for instance, irrigation, fertilizer, fertilizer's, plant protection product, seeds, fuel. 

We help to save up to 20 percent on seeds and fertilizers and it might sound not that like bid numbers, but for a particular farmer or the enterprise when they have like big amounts of to cope with, this is a significant percent. We enable effortless planning and monitoring of all the fields, activities for all the crops in one place and provide simple and clear data interpretation. Because when you know it is hard to cope with the big data and find some patterns, find some insights and to interpret them in the proper way, we held this one in one stop solution. Definitely, we have applicable custom solutions developed by our own science team. It's yield production, remote harvest, dynamics, monitoring, crop type classification, field boundaries, detection, soil moisture analytics and some more tailored solutions for the customers. 

0:10:59 - Mehmet
Okay, so can customers. Each customer, you can customize which data they would get or they will get everything. Okay, you mean? 

0:11:15 - Alex
something very specific, tailored to some very specific needs. 

0:11:20 - Mehmet
Yeah, for example, maybe because you are collecting data related to agriculture and you are collecting data to forestry, right. So, and maybe I don't know, I'm not then expecting agriculture, but I'm just maybe thinking out loud. Maybe someone who has the normal crops for wheat, for example, they need different measures and data than someone who has something else, maybe corn, I'm just yeah, I get the point. Yeah, so you can tailor. The solution is what I'm asking. 

0:12:01 - Alex
Yeah, actually, satellite images open up a wide range of data that can be applied to agriculture, both directly and indirectly. For example, using different satellites, we can get some indirect data for agricultural purposes, such as types of land, cover, relief, elevation, etc. But there is also some data that can be used for direct monitoring of agricultural lands in near real time. For example, there are satellites whose data is used to predict weather, from the level of precipitation and wind speed to the amount of solar radiation in the probability of hail, hurricanes, etc. As for the data that the EOSDA team works with, our team uses different satellites for different use cases. 

It's important to note that satellite data is most valuable if it's properly processed and necessary analytics is built. 

For example, we use satellites with optical sensors and a number of bends, it's spectral ranges and our computing capabilities to calculate different vegetation indices, the dynamics of which can show how the crop develops and also whether there are specific changes in the indices indicative of crop problems. 

Also, using optical satellite imagery in combination with AI solutions that we own, we can implement projects for crop classification, field boundaries detection and much more. Using data from satellites with radar sensors and algorithms developed by our team, we estimate soil moisture in dynamics for vast areas. This is possible because radar satellites allow electromagnetic waves to penetrate even under the soil surface, giving us information about its condition not only on the surface, but also for depths of up to 7-10 cm. Of course, we often receive very specific requests from our clients and we can be flexible in our capabilities. This is because satellite data is just once and zeros converted and passed, processed to image format. We can build a wide range of analytics based on this data using different algorithms and technologies. For example, last year we received a request from a large US agricultural holding to analyze a large area of agricultural land in terms of potential soil productivity in these areas, as the company wanted to invest in the right way. 

We implemented a customized project to create the so-called productivity maps, which were built on the basis of the average values of vegetation indices over the past 5-7 years. No-transcript to the identification of areas where yields could be significantly higher and where higher yields would require significantly more effort and investment. So this is just one of the dozens of similar projects we work on, and the possibilities of different solutions depend on the specifics of the satellites and the data they can provide, the level of earth coverage, whether local or global coverage is available, survey frequency, spatial resolution, spectral ranges and so on, and our EOS-Satellite is designed with an optimal balance of these characteristics to provide a wide range of analytics that can be built on the basis of satellite data for agribusiness purposes. 

0:16:12 - Mehmet
So, alex, this is really a good explanation and a lot of details. Now there must be some technical difficulties when working with satellite data. I'm not sure. Maybe you need to do some data cleansing. I'm not sure If you can explain what are some of the difficulties of this data and how, at EOS-DIA, you solve that. 

0:16:39 - Alex
I can invite our head of science and it will take a couple of days to explain. But when we focus on some generic technical difficulties which we have already faced or keep facing sometimes, I would focus on some of them. This is a big amount of data when working with time series. This is the first one. The second one is geo-referencing errors, like non-co-registered images in time series, different formats and data structure, different projections of data, and for all of these issues we use external and internal tech solutions to prepare and harmonize this data before the next stages of processing to execute the result of the analysis. So some parts of processing are fully automated, but some need manual efforts to get the best accuracy, like fixing geo-referencing errors. All our pipelines run on AWS resources to save time and cause some this processing. 

0:17:53 - Mehmet
Now the question is again we talked about a lot of agriculture and you mentioned forestry, but is there any other industry you think satellite data analytics can be applied in, maybe something related to environmental challenges? Can you think about any other use cases? 

0:18:18 - Alex
Yeah, we are diving. When you mentioned the environmental challenges, we have been diving deep for the like for recent time and we have been focusing on this one strategically. Actually, it can be applied to a lot of industries, but these require, as I've said, some data combinations, data sources combinations. When we talk about the sustainability stream and the coming out from environmental issue, we can say that various industries face environmental challenges at different scales, and this may be the disappearance of biodiversity, pollution of water and land, waste problem, and so on. So what is important is that the satellite data can help in almost every industry, and the main direction is fast and large-scale change detection. This can be detection of technological disasters, such as flooding of territories after a dam explosion or detection of an oil spill in the ocean. One of the popular areas is fire detection, which allows us to quickly react and save the lives of animals and people. Satellite data makes it possible to detect problems that are incredibly difficult and expensive to evaluate on the ground, such as garbage islands in the ocean or detection of melting icebergs. 

Another important aspect is the use of satellite data for modeling. These can be forecasts like change graphs in the temperature of other earth's surface in the next 20 years, or how climate change is going to affect the behavior of hurricanes. We can even make models of what kind of crop will grow in a certain area in 10 years. Models can be made of how carbon is sequestrated in the soil. Such models usually still use ground data, but satellite data is also an integral part. Satellite data can also be used in alternative energy. For example, you can calculate on what territory it would be effective to build a solar power plant, and so on. So much more use cases here and more to cover. 

0:21:03 - Mehmet
So that means before I come to the next question, just out of curiosity you need to deal with governmental institutions to work with them on leveraging this data. Is that right? 

0:21:22 - Alex
We are actually working with both governmental and commercial sectors, so for sure, the governmental sector has more capabilities to collect and provide this data and definitely, where it is possible, we get this data and definitely use it and help even governments and commercial institutions to utilize it properly and make it insightful. 

0:21:57 - Mehmet
Okay, yeah, that's fair enough. Just out of curiosity. Now, a couple of minutes back, you mentioned that you rely on your own satellites and why you didn't just use because we know there are plenty of them out there. So tell me about the satellite and its technical capabilities, the one that you own. 

0:22:22 - Alex
Yeah, we initially started as a company that is developing analytics software based on satellite imagery to fit various industries, and obviously the crop monitoring product is primarily focused on agriculture, as I've said, and our main source for of imagery we use in crop monitoring is Sentinel to satellite, which was built specifically for monitoring changes in land cover and to monitor the forests and so on, but the thing is that it has only 10 meter resolution, which sometimes is not enough for some agricultural use cases and does not fit the cutting edge agriculture technologies in terms of accuracy and other parameters. 

In addition, its revisit is only three to five days depending on the location, which is not sufficient during active phases of growth stages. So when we looked at the market, we did not find a proper source to close the gap because other satellites were designed for different purposes and didn't have enough versatility. And that's when we came up to an idea to launch a satellite constellation designed specifically for agriculture and related use cases to cover what we lack as for this moment and, additionally, to supplement Sentinel to data. So we will be able to combine those, and EOS said constellation will have the same bands range as Sentinel to, including an IR and red edge bands crucial for crop monitoring, for crop condition monitoring and, starting from the second satellite, we will have an SWIR channel which is a must have for deep crop health analysis. More over, with full constellation deployed, seven satellites, we will have one to three days revisit in standard mode and even higher with a tasking mode which suits brilliantly the need to monitor crops more often with the suitable means. 

0:24:45 - Mehmet
So in this case. 

0:24:46 - Alex
We build satellites based on what data we need and understanding what the agricultural market demands, not the other way around, because some of the providers first developed their satellites without having the understanding of what actually market needs, what use cases are most common on the market, and only then they some of them started building them their own Analytical software. We have decided to to go a bit another way. 

0:25:26 - Mehmet
Okay, so are you planning to to sell this data to other, maybe data analytics software, or are you going to just integrate it with with your own solution? 

0:25:39 - Alex
Yeah, we have started the pre-selling stage at the US at images so everyone could start buying single imagery, region imagery and Like or their annual monitoring in the near future. First, commercial images are expected to be delivered, I know, maybe by the end of this summer or in the autumn. We understand that this is space, this is an aggressive like environment and Some like terms might be flexible here. Of course, we will gradually integrate it in to our solutions. First and foremost is crop monitoring, which is the best tool to use all the benefits of US set one as it was specifically designed to fit, but best for agricultural purposes. Then it's platforms like forest monitoring and land viewer, but also you set capabilities will be used for specific custom projects and Solutions like crop classification, your prediction, carbon content monitoring and so on. 

0:26:44 - Mehmet
Mm-hmm. So you are ready to go? It looks like Alex, so you know this would be my, my final question before I have another question, which is my standard one how do you see the future of satellite data market, where we are heading? 

0:27:05 - Alex
In terms of market capacity for earth observation services in general. I would Refer to the numbers, which differ from source to source, but from what we have seen in different resources and forecasts, both internal and external, the market is projected to grow from 8 billion USD in 2022 to 40 47 billion USD in 2030, which shows a compound annual growth rate of over 20%. But in my opinion, given the rapid growth of technology, current economic and geopolitical changes and current space race, we will see bigger numbers and. 

This ensures our willingness to proceed, multiplied by belief in what we do and strive to make life on Earth better with the help of space solutions. We will inevitably face current space race transforming to a set of sustainable and, at some points, joint solutions serving specific goals in terms of waste reducing, cost optimization, deviation detection and much more in various industries like agriculture, carbon emissions, forestry, oil and gas mining, etc. And EOSDA is going to be in front of Earth observation and sustainability solutions, bringing more and more to these to the future. 

0:28:41 - Mehmet
That's something very interesting and, you know, I just imagined for a moment, you know, all the amount of these satellites out there and you know they are like a belt around Earth, you know, and, but they are providing us with a lot of information and making our lives much better, which is a great, I would say. You know, mission to be on Alex. So really I'm fascinated by the technology. You know, because you know, I'm a technical guy. I'm not a satellite, I'm a technical guy, but you know, always, you know, anything related to space also attracts me, especially if it's regarding not satellite imagery, because when I was younger, you know, I was very interested in satellite communications. 

Actually, you know and it's one of the things I was following and you enlighten a lot for us today. Any question you wish I asked you anything. Maybe I have missed and you want to tell us anything about. 

0:29:44 - Alex
It seems to me that we have covered a lot of points which might be of interest for our listeners. If somebody wants to ask me something else, feel free to reach me out via link then, or address your questions to Mehmet. You will definitely transfer them to me and we probably will have more. One more or few more podcasts to talk about different solutions, not only about space, maybe some in tech and that was also going to add one point. 

When you said your few last points, mehmet, and I also thought that I'm not a space guy, I was a tech guy. But something changed and the industry changes, the people changes, the vision and changes like influences on my personal mission. So I, from now on, from the moment I joined the company, I started to combine my own mission with the company mission. This is great. This is a rare case. And also, when you said about a lot of satellites over the earth, when you, there are a lot of services allowing to see different orbits, but when we talk about low earth orbit. 

If you open up 3d model of the planet earth and turn on all the satellites with all the orbits, you will barely see the earth. So when I was talking about the space race, this is. 

0:31:23 - Mehmet
It grows very rapidly yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fascinating, alex, as I told you, but I believe you know the this industry, you know when it's all started all together, you know from communication as a first use case, you know it pushed humanity way and I think now it's I'm calling it kind of a coming back to the roots because you're using the satellite actually to study the earth, yeah, which is which is and for good purpose, which is amazing. Again, thank you very much, alex for for the time and for all this valuable information and, as Alex mentioned, by the way, I will put the company website in the description and Alex's link, it in profile as well, if you want to connect with him. The way I end my episode, as usual, I tell you if you have any question, of course, about you know our satellite imagery data, you can reach out to me or Alex. Of course we can, we can. I will route the questions to Alex and your feedback, also about the episode. 

Did you enjoy it like? If you, what did you like the most? So please tell me your opinion. I'm keen to listen and read your comments about that and, as usual, also, if you are interested to be like Alex was a guest with me today. Don't be shy, reach out to me. We can arrange, we can set up a time, and I'm very flexible on the timing. I'm flexible on the location also as well. Usually we do remote, as you know, but that's fine. So whether you are, wherever you are in the world south pole, north pole, east west doesn't matter. We can make it happen and hope you enjoyed today and until we meet in the next episode. Thank you very much for your time and we'll see you soon. Bye, bye. 

Transcribed by https://hello.podium.page/?via=mehmet