OpenFarm is an open source crop intelligence platform: Sentinel-2 imagery, weather, soil and time fused into one explainable picture of every field you manage - with the observation, its size, its window, and the conditions behind it.
Block A1 · 12.40 ha · rice
8 Feb 2026
NDVI fell 18% over 14 days, from 0.71 to 0.58.
Why, from three sources
Water stress, not disease. Check irrigation before you spray.
10 m
Sentinel-2 resolution
24 mo
history on day one
0
API keys required
BSD-3
no seat limits
Multi-index
Same scene, same date, four indices. Vigour, canopy structure, soil-adjusted growth and surface water - each on a fixed scientific scale, so the same colour always means the same value across every field you own.
Vegetation vigour
Canopy structure
Soil-adjusted
Surface water
The stressed patch in the north-east shows in every index - that is what tells you it is real and not a cloud artefact.
Time is the fourth dimension
Twenty-four months of Sentinel-2 backfilled on the day you draw a boundary. Green-up, peak, senescence - and the week something went wrong.
Three layers
Four observation planes stack into one geometry. Layer B reads across all of them; layer C is only ever a way out. Each boundary is a real service boundary - run the whole stack, or take the observation layer and put your own models on top.
Boundaries
Drawn, imported, or detected by the FTW model
Satellite
Sentinel-2 at 10 m, four indices, weekly
Weather
Open-Meteo daily history plus 7-day forecast
Soil
SoilGrids 250 m worldwide, POLARIS 30 m in the US
Reproducible by construction
Four public steps, no black box in the middle. Every value in the UI carries the satellite, the date, the cloud cover and the colormap that produced it.
01
STAC search
Element84 catalogue, filtered by geometry, date and cloud cover.
02
COG generation
Index computed per scene, written to object storage as a cloud-optimised GeoTIFF.
03
TiTiler tiles
Served with a fixed colormap, so two fields are always comparable.
04
Stats & provenance
Zonal statistics stored alongside the scene that produced them.
Below the surface
Texture, pH, organic carbon, CEC and hydraulic properties for every layer down to 200 cm - pulled automatically the moment a field exists. This is what turns "NDVI is down" into "and the topsoil can't hold water".
Clay fraction rises with depth - water sits at 30-60 cm and the topsoil dries first.
Yours to run
Next.js, FastAPI, PostGIS, MinIO and TiTiler in one Docker Compose file. No Mapbox token, no per-hectare pricing, no vendor account standing between you and your own field data.
# clone, configure, run
git clone github.com/superzero11/OpenFarm
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up --build
# web :3000 · API :8000 · tiles :8080
Questions
The things people ask before running OpenFarm on their own fields.
OpenFarm is an open source crop intelligence platform. It fuses Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, daily weather and soil data into per-field insights, and shows the evidence behind every alert: which index moved, over what window, and the conditions that explain it.
It compares each new scene against the field's own history rather than a fixed threshold. When an index drops, OpenFarm reads rainfall, evapotranspiration and soil water balance for the same window, so the alert tells you whether it is water stress, not merely that something changed.
Sentinel-2, the European Space Agency's 10 m multispectral mission, searched through the public Element 84 Earth Search catalogue. OpenFarm computes NDVI, EVI, SAVI and NDWI per scene, skips scenes above the cloud threshold, and backfills 24 months of history when you draw a boundary.
ISRIC SoilGrids supplies texture, pH, organic carbon, CEC and hydraulic properties worldwide at 250 m, and POLARIS supplies 30 m coverage across the United States. Both are pulled automatically for every layer down to 200 cm the moment a field boundary exists.
Yes. OpenFarm is BSD-3-Clause licensed with no seat limits, no per-hectare pricing and no vendor account. Run the whole stack yourself at no cost beyond your own server, or try the hosted demo first. No third-party API keys are required, including for the basemap.
Yes, that is the default. Next.js, FastAPI, PostGIS, MinIO and TiTiler start from a single Docker Compose file on any VPS, and Terraform can provision the machine for you. The live demo runs on a free-tier 2 OCPU, 12 GB instance, which fits the entire stack.
Cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, fibre and perennial crops each ship with a suitability profile: temperature, rainfall, pH, drainage and salinity envelopes scored against your field's real soil and climate. Profiles are plain data in the repository, so adding a crop is a pull request.
Sentinel-2 revisits most fields every few days, and OpenFarm recomputes indices weekly from the newest usable scene. Weather refreshes daily alongside a 7-day forecast. Soil is fetched once per field, because soil properties change over decades rather than weeks.
From smallholders to enterprises. BSD-3-Clause, no seat limits, no lock-in, and contributions are genuinely wanted.
Acknowledgements
OpenFarm is a thin layer over decades of open source and open data. These projects do the hard parts, they are free for anyone to use, and self-hosting OpenFarm means standing on their work too.
Data and imagery
Copernicus Sentinel-2 (ESA) · Element 84 Earth Search · Open-Meteo · ISRIC SoilGrids · POLARIS · Fields of The World
Live demo hosting
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure runs openfarm.earth on an Always Free Ampere instance, the same 2 OCPU and 12 GB anyone can claim.