Gentle Reaper

One of our team members, Owen, lives in Clear Lake, Iowa, surrounded by corn and soybean fields as far as the eye can see. Ordinarily, family farmers go with the tried and true wisdom of corn one year, soybean the next. Soybean this year? Well, corn the next. Crop rotation helped humanity get the most out of the land's nutrients a few thousand years ago, but we can do better now! Unfortunately, figuring out the details isn't easy. Big Agriculture can afford sophisticated John Deere AI and Climate FieldView (tens of thousands of dollars, which small farmers can't afford) to optimize their planting. Now family farmers can too.

We pull from multiple USDA open-source maps, CME data exchanges, Sentinel-2 satellite data, and Iowa State University agricultural experiments, combining soil data and crop rotation history and a million other things to figure out exactly what should be planted, when. We catch the edge cases, e.g. sometimes corn should be planted multiple years in a row because a nearby ethanol plant outweighs the marginal benefit of crop rotation.

We hope that this tool can be used by family farmers (which are plentiful in Clear Lake, making up 92% of all farmers!) to compete with their competitors who can afford to spend $30,000 on top-of-the-line proprietary satellite access. We acknowledge it won't be as good, but we are sure that it offers an improvement over mindlessly cycling between stock crops each year.

Built With

• css
• folium
• html
• javascript
• jinja
• leaflet.js
• python
• scikit-learn
• shapely
• streamlit
• turf.js