Satshot Founder Lanny Faleide Takes Global Imagery to New Heights
Satshot founder Lanny Faleide accepts the 2024 CropLife Ag Tech Award of Excellence in the Legacy category from Editor Lara Sowinski during Tech Hub LIVE in Des Moines, IA.
Editor’s Note: The annual CropLife Ag Tech Awards of Excellence are presented each year during the Tech Hub LIVE Conference and Expo. Below is an excerpt from CropLife’s profile of Satshot founder Lanny Faleide, winner of the 2024 Legacy Award.
It was nearly 30 years ago that Lanny Faleide launched Satshot, a global imagery service for the precision agriculture industry. From an early age, Faleide loved imagery, and he loved space. Seeing the TV broadcast of the first moonwalk made a profound impression on him.
Shortly after starting college in the early 1970s, Faleide quit school to return home and help his father farm. At the time, the U.S.-Soviet Union grain deal had tripled the price of wheat. Like many others in his age group who grew up on family farms, Faleide thought this might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to “become millionaires,” he recalls.
Although he didn’t achieve millionaire status, Faleide did earn his private pilot’s license.
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“In 1977, I was taking pictures of our crops with near-infrared film and my 35 mm camera,” he says. “Because I was looking at the crops from above and was seeing all the variation that were going unaddressed, that stayed in my head.”
Likewise, the satellite imagery sector was also beginning to take off, thanks to interest generated by the Apollo moon missions and the stunning images of earth taken from space.
NASA’s Landsat 1 satellite launched in 1972, marking a new age of remote sensing of land from space.
The U.S. farm crisis of the 1980s proved to be a “very difficult financial decade” for Faleide and his wife. After many years in the agriculture business, they decided to change careers. He gave up his rented farmland and concentrated farming on his and his family’s land.
Faleide enrolled in GIS classes at North Dakota State University.
In 1986, France launched its first commercial satellite, SPOT 1.
Shortly thereafter, Faleide started “dabbling” in satellites, and the idea to launch his own satellite imagery company soon followed.
A big break came during a routine trip to the grocery store where Faleide ran into a childhood friend who was working with the Crystal Sugar company. Faleide mentioned his budding satellite imagery company and asked his friend if he could connect Faleide with someone at Crystal Sugar so he could pitch his services.
It turns out, his friend was that person.
From that moment on, imagery was at the forefront for Faleide.
Read more at CropLife.
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