When I was an agronomist I used satellite imagery a lot for monitoring farm crops for our customers. Started in the early eighties going up in a Cessna laying

When I was an agronomist I used satellite imagery a lot for monitoring farm crops for our customers. Started in the early eighties going up in a Cessna laying on my belly where the passenger seat was sticking a 35mm camera out a repair port. But that got old and started researching satellite options. Problems was our company entire sales area was three West Michigan counties. All the companies wanted to sell me, I forget the term but say a tract (scene?), that was half the state. I didn't have a problem with the price per acre but wanted to buy by the section or 640 acres. It didn't make a lot of sense to buy the township but they wouldn't even sell me by the county. At the time probably 5% of my customers wanted this service and only wanted to buy just part of their acreage. I asked all these vendors why they couldn't sell me by the township. They routinely answered they'd lose money because they couldn't sell the rest of the tract. I said now you understand my problem, at a certain point you've got to break up a tract or give up on the market. Most of the company's ended up leaving ag. I eventually found a company that would sell by the section at a higher but still manageable price. Course then I discovered that in four flyovers a season the majority had clouds over the field and you couldn't see anything ;<(. Such is the pain of being an early user in any field. FYI The military has satellites using radar to see through the clouds, but in thirty years that tech hasn't made it to the commercial operators. The answer I think is automated drones that fly a circuit. The tech has been available for a few years but the government won't approve it for that use. In fact the FAA won't even let a Detroit company demonstrate they could successfully evade objects, they ran out of funding and shut their doors ;<(.