Twenty-four pounds a field a year, for something largely built on free public data.
Sentinel-2 imagery is free, open and revisits every five days at ten-metre resolution. Met Office observations are public. The value in a field-level subscription is not the data; it is the interpretation, the alerting and the fact that somebody has already done the joining up.
What a field subscription would actually include.
Satellite
- Source
- Copernicus Sentinel-2, free and open
- Resolution
- Ten metres for the visible and near-infrared bands
- Revisit
- Every five days, cloud permitting — which in Britain is the whole problem
- Derived
- NDVI and biomass indices, per field, through the season
Weather
- Observations
- Nearest Met Office station, plus an on-farm station where one exists
- Microclimate
- Interpolated to the field, which is a model rather than a measurement
- Soil temperature
- Modelled at 10cm, for drilling and emergence decisions
- Growing degree days
- Accumulated from drilling, per field
The alerts, which are the actual product
- Spray windows
- Wind, temperature and rain-free hours, for the next five days
- Frost risk
- At the stem-extension stage, when it becomes expensive
- Disease pressure
- Septoria and yellow rust models, run against local weather
- Harvest windows
- Two dry days, and the moisture trajectory
The price
- Per field, per year
- £24
- Minimum
- None. One field is a perfectly reasonable subscription
- On this farm’s scale
- Around fifty fields, so roughly £1,200 a year
- What you are paying for
- Interpretation and alerting. The underlying data is largely free
Saying plainly that the underlying data is free is unusual in this market and is the reason this page exists. The work is real; the raw material is public.
Why the free data is not enough on its own.
Because Sentinel-2 delivers a raster, not an answer. Turning it into something a farmer acts on requires cloud masking, field boundary geometry, index calculation, a baseline for that field, and somebody deciding what counts as a meaningful change.
And because the alert is the product. Nobody logs into a dashboard in April. A message saying there are eleven rain-free hours with the wind under twelve miles an hour on Thursday morning is worth considerably more than a map, because it changes a decision on the day it is made.
The honest version of this business says that out loud, prices accordingly, and does not pretend to own a satellite.
What twenty-four pounds a field buys, against the alternatives.
| Option | Cost | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing, and a look at the sky | £0 | The method used for most of human history | It works until the year it does not |
| A free satellite viewer | £0 | The imagery, unprocessed, when you remember to look | No alerting, no baseline, and cloud you have to spot yourself |
| This subscription | £24/field/year | Processed indices, modelled microclimate, and alerts that arrive | The microclimate figure is a model, and models are wrong somewhere |
| An on-farm weather station | £400–£2,000 once | Real measurements, at your gate | One point, which does not describe a field a mile away |
| A full agronomy service | Thousands a year | A person who walks the fields and is accountable | Cost, and it is not a substitute for either of the above |
The limit of a model.
A microclimate figure for a field with no station in it is an interpolation from stations that are somewhere else. It is usually close. On the days it matters most — a local frost, a thunderstorm that hit one side of the farm — it is often not.
That is the same basis-risk problem as the parametric insurance page, arriving from a different direction, and it deserves the same treatment: state it, quantify it where you can, and never let the interface present a modelled number in the same typeface as a measured one.
The subscription, questioned.
Four questions, and the first one is the honest one.
Because a raster is not an answer. You are paying for cloud masking, field geometry, a baseline for that field, and a message that arrives on the morning it matters.
Usually close, and worst on the days it matters most — a local frost, a storm that hits one side of the farm. It is a model, it is labelled as one, and it is never shown in the same typeface as a measured number.
Yes. There is no minimum, because a minimum would only exist to make the number look bigger.
No, and any product claiming it does is selling you the wrong thing. It fills the gap between visits.
The other half of the data question.
Soil and yield, and who is actually allowed to sell it.
Elsewhere on the estate.
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