OneSoil: a handy free fieldmap and scouting app

At the recent Smart Farming Days in Bohmte (Germany) organised by DKE Data, the organisation behind Agrirouter, various app providers presented their solutions. Most of them focus on farm management and contractor solutions. Not OneSoil however.

With their free app, OneSoil identifies field boundaries, crops and NDVI biomass based on satellite imagery. Their algorithms assist is telling you where field boundaries are and what crop is grown on particular fields. Whether these are yours or not. With the data and especially with the NDVI maps, you can track and follow vegetation/crop development. It also lets you create application maps for seeding, fertilising and crop protection.

Identify problem areas

One of the clever features of the app is that it can help identify problem areas in your fields. Once identified, you can use the app to guide, to navigate you to that problem area in the field. Users especially value this feature that also comes in practical for crop advisors and agronomists.

Also available is a paid option called ‘Yield’. When you subscribe to this, the app identifies fields and zones that are interesting for variable rate seeding, fertilising and spraying. If crops or fields appear homogeneous, it classifies these as not suitable for VRA. If VRA is likely to result in better or higher yields, you can create prescription maps and export these in various formats including John Deere, Trimble, Shape and ISO-XML. Interesting is the ability to include reference zones or control strips with for instance the standard seed or fertiliser rates. For evaluating your VRA measures, you can import yield monitoring data.

For 13 different crops

Swiss company OneSoil was founded in 2017 and launched its app for Android and Apple smartphones and tablets and pc’s in 2018. Their algorithms can identify 13 different crops including barley, oilseed rape, maize, soybeans, sunflower, wheat and grassland. The app is currently available in the USA, in South America, Europe, Australia, China and South Africa.