Your field from space
Type a quarter's legal land description and see it from the Sentinel-2 satellites: a picture from the clear passes this season, and how green the field was through it. Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba. Free, nothing to sign up for.
Quarter, section, township, range and meridian, as on your title or tax notice.
Look up any quarter, free, no sign-up. Keep the ones you farm in a free GrainPosition book, and get an email in June and July when one greens less. Open your book
Tap around the cropped area for its real acres.
Tap each corner of the cropped area on the map, in order around the edge. Leave out the yard, sloughs and bush. Zoom in for the corners.
Your free book keeps the quarter with these acres for its crop, and works out what it should bring in.
little greenvery greenGrey: cloud, shadow or snow on that pass. Same colours on every pass.
A drawing of the ground’s shape from laser heights (Natural Resources Canada’s lidar), not a photo: shaded as if lit from the northwest, so slopes facing the light are pale and those facing away darker. Knolls, hollows, sloughs and drainage lines show; a weak patch on the greenness map that sits in a hollow is often a wet spot. It doesn’t change from pass to pass. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
How green it was
How green it was, year by year
The four seasons before: with a free accountCompare this quarter with its last four seasons, each year's greenest day, and note what you grew on it each year. Free, with your email, no password.
Compare past yearsEach dot is a clear pass; tap one to see its picture. Ticks along the bottom are passes too cloudy to use.
Keep watching this field
Put it in your free GrainPosition book: each new clear pass is added through the season, an email in June and July if the field greens less (checked on the next clear pass, so a hazy day doesn't count), and room for your other quarters.
Your email on the next page opens your book with a sign-in link. No password, no card.
What it shows
The European Space Agency's two Sentinel-2 satellites photograph every Prairie field every few days, at 10 metres a pixel. This page asks for the season's passes over your quarter, leaves out the ones where cloud, cloud shadow or snow covers more than a fifth of the field, and shows the rest: a natural colour picture of the quarter and the land around it, and the field's greenness.
Greenness here is NDVI, worked out from how the field reflects red and near-infrared light. Bare soil and stubble read about 0.1 to 0.2, a crop coming up or ripening 0.3 to 0.5, a full green crop 0.7 to 0.9; pasture and bush stay green longer than a crop. A dip and a recovery a few days later is usually haze or smoke the cloud mask missed. It says how green the field looked from space, not why: walk it to know.
Finding the quarter: in Alberta the outline comes from the province's own survey grid, and in Manitoba from the province's quarter section centres. Saskatchewan has no open copy of its grid, so there the outline is worked out from the Dominion Land Survey's rules and can be a few hundred metres off: drag the outline onto your field on the map, or tap where its middle should be, and it moves there.
Questions
How do I see a satellite picture of my field?
Type the quarter's legal land description, like NW 12-34-5 W3, above. You get a map of the quarter and the land around it, which you can drag and zoom like any web map, from the clear passes of the Sentinel-2 satellites this season, and how green the field was; pick an earlier season, back to 2017, to compare years, or play a season through. Free, no sign-up. New lookups without an account share a daily allowance from the satellite service, up to ten new quarters a visitor a day, and 60 moves of an outline; past that, signing up free keeps looking.
What does the greenness number mean?
It is NDVI, a measure of green plant cover: about 0.1 to 0.2 for bare soil or stubble, 0.3 to 0.5 for a crop coming up or ripening, 0.7 to 0.9 for a full green crop. It says how green the field looked, not why.
How often is there a new picture?
The satellites pass every few days, but cloud hides many passes. On the fields tried, between about a third and a half of a season's passes were clear enough to use.
Is what I type kept?
The quarter's outline goes to the province's survey service and to Copernicus to find it and read its season; no name, no farm and nothing about you. The season for that spot is kept a week, so the next look is quick. Nothing ties it to you.
Sources and method
Pictures and greenness: Sentinel-2 Level-2A surface reflectance. The greenness and its map through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem's processing services; the natural-colour pictures through Microsoft's Planetary Computer, or Copernicus when it doesn't answer. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data. Lay of the land: Natural Resources Canada’s High Resolution Digital Elevation Model (from lidar), shaded; not every spot is covered yet. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. NDVI = (near-infrared − red) / (near-infrared + red), bands 8 and 4, averaged over the field's clear pixels 30 metres inside its lines; the scene classification decides what's clear.
Quarter sections: Alberta Township System (ATS v4.1), Government of Alberta, Open Government Licence – Alberta. Manitoba Original Survey Legal Descriptions, Government of Manitoba, OpenMB Information and Data Use Licence. Saskatchewan: worked out from the Dominion Land Survey's rules (meridians, 6-mile townships from the 49th parallel, base lines every four townships); tested against Alberta's official quarters it was about 300 metres off on average, so the page says so and lets you place it.
Were you paid right on your last grain settlement?
Send me a photo of the settlement, and the contract if you have it. Within a day I’ll email you back what each line is, what’s worth asking the buyer about, and any grade or payment deadline that’s still open. Free, no account.
Ruslan Glick, Winnipeg. Not a farmer, so I check against your contract and the grain rules, not opinions. Top Crop Manager wrote about GrainPosition.