Answers to common questions.

HSAT provides crop intelligence for buyers and traders of agricultural commodities. We predict crop production, risks and pricing with high accuracy, months ahead of the market using satellite images, weather data, market data and ground truth.

Traders, food & drink manufacturers, producers, insurers, and lenders — anyone with exposure to crop supply, risk, or pricing.

We help procurement teams plan purchases and avoid procurement shocks by anticipating volatility before public data is available.

We help producers manage all of the aspects related to the production of the crop, from crop health across the fields being managed, to the activities of the entire chain of people involved in processing the crop, including farmers, harvesters, transporters and (where applicable) factory managers. This includes real-time management through mobile apps tailored to each of the underlying roles.

Our offering is unique for several reasons: (a) an approach that rests on solving current data problems as presented by people who trade or procure agri commodities, and (b) the variety of data sources that we generate and procure to produce accurate forecasts. Ground truth: we believe we are the only provider in our space that systematically acquires and incorporates ground truth data as part of our analysis.

We use a wide variety of data sources to increase the accuracy of our forecasts: satellite imagery, field-level weather data, ground truth data (images, video, and survey results), and historical data (40+ years).

This depends on the product/service. The third-party data we use as inputs includes generic weather, satellite data, financial reports and government reports, research, and market data.

Most of our data is proprietary in the sense that any third-party data inputs are transformed before they are packaged into our proprietary services such as field-level weather, concise news summaries, ground truth acquisition methodology, and image/video processing.

We help traders maximize their profits by calibrating the timing and volume of their trades based on real-time data that enables them to reduce the risks associated with price movements.

We provide hedge funds data about agricultural commodities that help them find alpha, either through direct implementation of our crop production forecasts, or the integration of specific data points that improve their own trading strategies models.

It depends on the specific needs of each hedge fund, but here are three examples: develop a trading strategy based on our crop production forecasts; implement our field-level weather reporting to improve its own model; understand the impact of extreme weather events on the crops traded by the fund. For example, HSAT assessed the impact of floods in Pakistan on cotton yield, and the impact of drought on barley in Spain.

We offer three core products: CropGPT (crop intelligence and real-time data — weather, crop health, soil moisture, government/industry intelligence, market data, risk alerts, satellite imagery on demand, historical data, forecasts, ground truth); CropGPT+ (crop forecasts and predictive intelligence — area, yield and production forecasts delivered 6 months ahead of harvest, updated weekly); CropManager (a unified platform to manage crops from field to factory — field tracking, risk management, event recording, yield forecasting, production logistics management).

Yes. Our products were initially developed based on requests from active or prospective clients. As this approach has been effective for all concerned, we continue to offer consulting services to help us improve and expand our capabilities. As we complete the delivery of a new service, we consolidate the resulting capability into one of our core products.

We offer a range of customized services to a variety of clients, such as: crop disease assessments (e.g., the spread of CSSV in West Africa); the impact of smuggling on cocoa production metrics; ground truth collection in the aftermath of natural catastrophes; exclusive crop forecasts for specific crop/regions; tailored crop intelligence; development of a new crop intelligence service not included in our current offering.

Years ago, we developed a system to generate risk alerts for clients who subscribed to our crop production forecasts. We eventually integrated this capability for customers who simply wish to receive the same alerts, and into the risk management dashboard that is integrated into our CropGPT platform.

We cover 700 crop/region combinations including barley, canola, cashews, cocoa, coffee, cotton, maize, wheat, soy, sugar, rice, and others. Our models span 90%+ of global production across 50+ countries. CropGPT provides additional information about countries and crops covered.

We typically achieve 93–98% accuracy. The variability is primarily due to the crop and region, and the data available to build models from. We consistently outperform market benchmarks for accuracy.

Adaptability and flexibility. Our predictive models are tailored to each crop and region, using the data sources that are the most appropriate for that combination. The data points that help forecast cocoa in Ivory Coast differ from the crop in Ecuador. The best data points are reassessed each year for each of our predictive models to determine if changes are required.

We generally update yield/production forecasts weekly.

News and crop intelligence are continuously updated, every day, with more than 2 new reports published every hour. Weather is updated daily — and can be updated to an increased frequency of every 6 hours. Crop health is updated every fortnight.

Through API, dashboards, alerts, weekly reports, Excel/CSV exports, and direct integrations with BI tools.

Yes — REST API, flat files, custom dashboards, and plug-ins for Tableau, PowerBI, etc.

HSAT combines together public data, bespoke data (weather and satellite mapping) and proprietary data (ground truth, research, analytics). This then drives proprietary crop models. No other company has the breadth or depth of data available.