Land O' Lakes unit GEOSYS, UrtheDaily Constellation announce agreement

Date:02-10-2017

UrtheCast Corp., and Land O' Lakes, Inc., one of the United States' premier agribusiness and food companies, recently announced a long-term agreement for GEOSYS, a Land O'Lakes subsidiary, to purchase geospatial data from the UrtheDaily Constellation, UrtheCast's planned constellation of Earth observation satellites which will deliver daily, medium resolution imagery of the entire planet's landmass.

By entering this agreement, GEOSYS will become an anchor customer for the UrtheDaily Constellation. GEOSYS, already the UrtheCast group's largest agricultural customer and one of the world's leading providers of digital agriculture solutions, will use the data to improve the decision-making processes for their customers globally, including WinField United, the Land O'Lakes crop input business.

"GEOSYS has 30 years of experience in the industry and views this flow of data as a highly innovative technical and commercial game changer for in-season field monitoring," says Damien Lepoutre, GEOSYS founder and president.

"The UrtheDaily Constellation is being built on a heritage of proven technology and is the only solution we've seen clearly designed to meet our demanding data requirements. This will dramatically increase the value of decision support tools made available to farmers through our customers. As a result, we are committed to helping UrtheCast bring UrtheDaily to market," says Lepoutre.

The UrtheCast group has worked collaboratively with GEOSYS in recent years - along with customers operating in such diverse sectors as water management, insurance, municipal planning, finance and defense and intelligence - to conceptualize and design the UrtheDaily Constellation.

The Constellation, expected to be comprised of eight Earth observation satellites, is designed to capture high-resolution imagery of the Earth's entire landmass (excluding Antarctica) every day, producing machine learning-ready, scientific-grade data to help geoanalytics companies measure and monitor change on our planet, and ultimately help to address some of Earth's biggest challenges, at scale.

Providing the UrtheDaily dataset to GEOSYS will enable their customers to make more profitable and agronomically sound decisions.

"We are honored to announce GEOSYS as the UrtheDaily anchor customer for agriculture," stated Wade Larson, UrtheCast's President and CEO. "The selection of UrtheDaily by GEOSYS, a pioneer in digital agriculture, validates our belief that UrtheDaily is the remote-sensing constellation of choice for the sophisticated geoanalytics market. We at UrtheCast are extremely pleased to partner with an organization that shares many of our core values and ambitions as we look to jointly harness the capabilities of UrtheDaily to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues."

Under the terms of the agreement, payments will be made as soon as UrtheCast begins delivering UrtheDaily Constellation data to Geosys, subject to UrtheCast arranging its financing for the build and launch of the UrtheDaily Constellation, and other customary covenants for agreements of this nature.