Terrametric

Inspiration

Every year, farmers from all over the world have to make a choice: either act on instinct or wait for certainty until it's too late. While satellite data can detect crop stress weeks earlier, that insight isn’t reaching the people who need it in time.

What it does

Terrametric delivers a personalized console of the farm's live stress score, a 14-day yield forecast, and a prescription for what needs to be done, with all the math already done.

Terrametric streams a live 3D globe scan of the entire portfolio. The farm fields light up in real time, either green, amber, or red, while the model scores them. The portfolio loss counter ticks upward. The room goes quiet

How we built it

Five satellite signals feed into the model: vegetation health (NDVI), water content (NDWI), heat stress (SWIR), soil moisture (NASA SMAP), and rainfall deficit.

An XGBoost classifier turns those signals into a stress score between 0 and 1. A second model converts that score into a dollar loss using field size and crop type. Every field gets a specific prescription: how many inches to irrigate, by when, at what cost, and exactly how much loss it prevents.

An AI copilot — powered by Qwen 2.5 with 11 agronomic tools — lets agronomists ask plain-English questions grounded in live field data and indexed USDA extension reports.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we faced were connecting our backend with the frontend. Creating a globe that shows the farms that are connected to the app took time. The other hard problem: cloud cover. Optical satellites go blind during storms. NASA SMAP's radar signal punches through clouds. Fusing both signals was the architectural decision that made the model reliable year-round.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having our product be able to serve the food growers of the country.

What we learned

The hardest problem wasn't the model — it was the framing. A stress score means nothing to a farmer. A dollar figure with a deadline does. We rewrote the prescription screen six times before we stopped leading with the data and started leading with the decision. That single shift unlocked the whole product

What's next for Terrametric

Expand beyond Story County. The model is geography-agnostic. Iowa to Kansas to Nebraska to the Central Valley and then to the whole country — same pipeline, same economics.

Partner with a regional crop insurer. They have the portfolio data and the clearest financial incentive to know about losses before claims are filed. That's the first real deployment.

The long-term flywheel: farmers get prescriptions, insurers get early warning, both benefit from the same satellite pass. Unit economics improve with every new field enrolled.