Last winter at this time The Western Producer featured a startup satellite imaging company called OneSoil, based in Belarus.
OneSoil has since left Belarus and moved to Switzerland and Poland.
On March 4, 2022, The Western Producer conducted a Zoom interview with OneSoil chief executive officer Morten Schmidt, who said that, while OneSoil satellite imaging is free to farmers anywhere on Earth, their main client base started in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
“We provide our services to farmers who grow grain for export in these areas, so our services keep track of what’s happening on these fields,” said Schmidt.
“We see that in Ukraine where our app covers 80 percent of fields, the activity by users is down about 60 percent since the war started.”
He added he will continue to report the data as the season progresses.
“Farmers who use our images are using them only 40 percent compared to before. We think there is adequate supply of seed and fertilizer because they were already purchased. But just like the Russian army, there’s not enough fuel. And what fuel farmers can find might be taken by the army. In the eastern part of Ukraine there is more military activity, thus more fuel being consumed.
“With our monitoring, we can study the soil very closely, so we can tell which fields have been seeded. And, of course, the winter wheat is already in the ground.”
Schmidt confirmed information that North Americans glean from the news. Machine operators who venture off the pavement and onto rural roads and farm fields may spend may spend the rest of the war there. This leaves the invasion forced pinned down in long columns of perfect targets for aircraft. However, Ukraine is not equipped with the necessary aircraft to take full advantage of the situation. He adds that Ukrainian ground forces are doing what they can to destroy stuck vehicles.
Schmidt says he has been confronted by the issue of Russian intelligence using his free OneSoil images to track military routes to better manage their invasion.
“We think they did try to use them. When the war started we saw a spike in downloads. But they found out it’s not like what you see in movies. We provide images in NDVI. These are not real time images. Just a 10-metre square shot, which we process into NDVI.”
He said the political situation was not his main reason for moving to Poland. It was the sanctions on Belarus that prevented OneSoil from expanding their Earth observation business to the rest of the world. But that was before the war started.
“OneSoil has clients and users in Russia. We use our influence to urge them to go against the actions of their government. That’s the best way to get this war to end. This is not a war of the Russian people. This is a war of a Russian dictator. The Russian people are the ones who can end this war.
“For myself, and for all the people I deal with in Europe and around the globe, I think we are all terrified and in shock. How can it be that in the world of 2022 we have a dictatorship that can go in with violence and put all rules of humanity aside and start killing people like Hitler did in 1939. And threaten atomic war.”
