Zema Global has partnered with satellite crop intelligence provider SatYield to offer in-season forecasts of agricultural yields and production in the US and Brazil, Trade Finance Global reported. The collaboration, announced on 14 October, is intended to help commodity market participants identify changes in physical supply earlier and incorporate those signals into trading and risk management.
The coverage will extend beyond production forecasts to estimates of planted and harvested areas, crop condition indicators and harvest progress. Users will also receive information on growth stages, weather effects and historical conditions, alongside supporting documentation and metadata. The partners identified soy and corn traders, hedge funds and energy market participants involved in biofuels as groups for which the service would be particularly relevant.
SatYield combines satellite observations with biophysical crop modelling to follow crop development during the growing season. According to Trade Finance Global, satellite cameras and sensors capture information across wavelengths that include visible light, infrared and thermal radiation. Differences in how plants absorb and reflect light allow analysts to assess vegetation health and vigour, with healthy plants strongly reflecting near-infrared light while absorbing blue and red light for photosynthesis.
Those observations can provide indicators of plant water content and drought stress, as well as soil temperature and evaporation. The source also described satellite technology’s ability to examine surface moisture through cloud cover and darkness. Together with crop modelling, the measurements are intended to give users a clearer view of how growing conditions and expected yields change over the course of a season.
Gabby Nizri, SatYield’s co-founder and chief executive, said commodity markets needed independent indications of supply changes before those shifts became widely accepted market expectations. He said Zema Global would make the crop information more readily usable by aligning it with market and weather data. The partnership’s focus is therefore not just on collecting observations, but on making them available in a form that can inform trading strategies and the management of market risk.