RapidEye, the geospatial solutions provider who owns and operates their own constellation of Earth observation satellites, have successfully completed two pilot projects for VISIOPLAINE, a brand of S2B (Société des Services aux Betteraviers) in France to support nitrogen fertilization of canola and wheat fields.

S2B offers remote sensing-based services to its customers in the French agriculture market. VISIOPLAINE is a project and brand of S2B that operates a web-based platform to distribute services to cooperatives and farmers. S2B has identified RapidEye as a geo-information provider in the industry capable of delivering remote sensing-based information on agricultural areas at a high temporal frequency. RapidEye provided S2B's VISIOPLAINE platform with biomass maps to support nitrogen fertilization of canola fields for five regions from early winter 2008 to early spring 2009. In June 2009, RapidEye delivered chlorophyll maps for two different areas in France. The results and field measurements are being tested, analyzed, and confirmed this year before introducing this solution into the wheat market in 2010. The cooperatives and scientific institutes contributed information collected in the fields, whereas RapidEye was responsible for the analysis from the remote sensing perspective, and delivered an intermediate product in the form of biomass and chlorophyll maps. Based on these maps, S2B was able to make recommendations for nitrogen fertilization in canola and wheat fields to the farming community through their VISIOPLAINE platform. Future projects with S2B include Precision Farming services for sunflower, potatoes and sugarbeet. RapidEye's contributions to these projects include identifying variabilities of biophysical parameters within fields such as nitrogen content and leaf area index.