News

EarthOptics reaches one million acres mapped

EarthOptics has announced it has mapped more than one million acres of farm and ranchland since the company began collecting data five years ago.

CEO Lars Dyrud tells Brownfield technicians use sensors mounted on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and machine learning to analyze soil samples.

“We have a couple of sensors that are measuring about 20 points multiple times per second, all the way down to about 3 feet depth, and so all that data gets combined together with elevation data, satellite data, and the sensor and sample data to create really high-resolution maps of soil fertility, soil compaction, or soil carbon,” he explains.

He says traditional soil sampling on a grid system collects a limited number of measurements while their technology collects millions of data points for farming decisions.

“It was a data set that was used by several Ph.D. researchers, but really it was machine learning that allowed us to make them relevant for every single field without having to have a Ph.D. researcher compile a set of analysis for each field,” he says.

Dyrud says the company has also verified their customers have sequestered about 300,000 tons of carbon in the soil.

Photo courtesy of EarthOptics.