Forty-three seasons of one Nebraska pivot, and its first zone map

A centre pivot near Seward, Nebraska, 47.4 hectares in corn, is one of the test fields behind the field register. Every season of the open satellite record falls over it, which makes it a good place to show what a field's own history looks like when every year is read.

This is one of our own test cases. The same record comes back for any field on the register, and for one field free from the free field record.

For each season from 1984 to 2026 we took the field's peak canopy reading, using only looks that were clear of cloud across the whole field. Landsat carries the years before 2016 and Copernicus Sentinel-2 the years since, and every bar names the sensor it came from.

The same pivot was then split into three management zones from this season's vegetation, the field's terrain from the Copernicus DEM, and its moisture pattern from Sentinel-1 radar.

For a retailer's agronomy team, the field's own history is the baseline every weekly status is read against. A field is flagged when it moves against its own range, which is how twenty fields that moved come out of a book of a thousand.

For a consultant, the history is also something written to show a landlord or a lender: every season since 1984, each bar with its sensor, in a PDF under the consultant's own name.