Part 1 of 2 · Captured
Five real farms, seen from space
- Real Sentinel-2 acquisitions of five working farms (September 2026), shown as measured bands and model output, each labelled.
- Processed by the app's pipeline in the iOS simulator on a Mac, not on a phone: sharpened, then scanned for fields.
- Three views per farm — a model preview (not a photograph), false colour, and the outlines from the app's current NDVI rule: a baseline we measure against, not our method.
- Vegetation indices are off by default — tick “Add customer indices” below to see the crop-vigour (NDVI) view, labelled as a derived view.
- Outlines are suggestions a farmer confirms, not surveyed boundaries.
- The Nile Delta is kept on purpose — it shows what cloud does to the result.
On the phone
The Field Explorer app
- Screens from the running app — iPhone simulator, development build.
- Fields come from satellite imagery, not from typing in an address.
How to read these results
- 26 outlines across five farms, 5 of them field-sized. The rest are fragments — part of a pivot, a small plot.
- It misses fields. In Imperial Valley and the Pampas many clearly green fields got no outline. What it does outline sits on irrigated ground.
- Desert pivots work best — green circles on bare sand are the easiest case.
- Sharpened ≠ measured. The 2.5 m image is a model's reconstruction on a finer grid; the satellite still measured 10 m.
Why it under-detects — the measured reasons
- 1,193 candidate shapes were found; 1,034 (87%) were smaller than the 0.64 ha minimum and dropped.
- Edges of the image, outline tracing and cloud-masked neighbours removed 111 more — all 21 cloud cases at the Nile Delta.
- A fixed vegetation cut-off suits desert pivots and misses harvested or sparse fields. No threshold was tuned for this page.
- The outlines come from the iPhone app's current deterministic vegetation-index (NDVI) rule, not a trained detector, and carry no learned confidence. It is the baseline a learned boundary model, in development on the boundary track, is measured against.
The five farms
Loading the five farms…
The sharpening step
10 m in, 2.5 m out
- Same ground, same scene — Wadi ad-Dawasir, 11 September 2026.
- Left: the satellite's own pixels, enlarged 4× so both sides are the same size.
- Right: the model's 2.5 m reconstruction. Finer grid, not finer measurement — use it to see, not to measure.