Field monitoring: the 12 questions we hear most

Money: price and payback

1. How much does monitoring cost?

Pricing scales with acreage and modules — a small farm pays a small subscription. What matters more: migration, setup, and training are included, and there’s no hardware to buy. We calculate the exact figure and agree billing terms during a 30-minute demo.

2. When does it pay for itself?

Typically within the first season, on costs alone: zonal treatments, fewer repeated passes, and honest plan-vs-actual usually free up 10–15% of the crop protection budget. The full mechanics with a worked example are in the crop protection math.

3. We farm 500 hectares. Is this for us, or for holdings?

The percentages don’t care about your size — a wasted pass wastes the same share of budget on 500 ha as on 50,000. The subscription scales down with area, so payback logic survives. What small farms actually lack is time, and monitoring returns exactly that: the agronomist stops driving circles. More on this in what farming without monitoring costs.

Technology: accuracy and trust

4. How accurate are satellite maps?

Sentinel-2 pixels are 10×10 meters — enough to see zones inside any field, not individual plants. The index math is standard science; the honest limits are clouds (covered by radar) and the fact that a map shows *where* to look, not *what* happened. Diagnosis stays with the scout.

5. How fresh is the imagery?

A new optical pass every 3–5 days, radar in between — radar sees through clouds. In a long overcast stretch you’ll still see field dynamics, just in coarser strokes.

6. Satellite or drone?

Different jobs. The satellite watches everything, regularly, at no marginal cost — that’s routine monitoring. A drone photographs one place, on demand, in centimeter detail — that’s special cases. Farms that start with drones usually end up flying twice a year; farms that start with satellites use them every week.

7. Can the AI be trusted?

Trust it the way you trust a sharp assistant: Planva AI reads your imagery, weather, and history, flags anomalies, and drafts tasks — but it proposes, the agronomist disposes. Every alert links to the data behind it, so you can always check its work.

Fieldwork: signal, phones, habits

8. There’s no signal in our fields. Does the app still work?

Fully. The mobile app is offline-first: maps, observations, photos, and tasks work with zero bars and sync when the phone finds a network — even if that’s in the evening at home.

9. Will our agronomists actually use it?

The app is deliberately simpler than a messenger: open field, add photo, done. In practice adoption hinges on one thing — whether the map genuinely saves driving. It does, and skeptics usually convert after the first problem it catches early. A rollout sequence that respects busy people is in the first-season playbook.

Data: safety and ownership

10. Where is our data stored, and who owns it?

In your country or on your own servers when you choose on-premise deployment — and it stays yours. Boundaries, history, and observations export on request in standard formats. No vendor lock: we would rather keep you with the product than with hostage data.

11. Can competitors or anyone else see our fields?

No. Access is per-account within your farm, with roles — a scout sees his tasks, the director sees everything. Raw satellite imagery of the planet is public by nature; your boundaries, notes, and numbers are not, and never leave your account.

12. What happens to our data if we leave?

You take it with you: a full export of boundaries, operations, and observations. The history belongs to the farm. Read how Planva handles the migration.