Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole field.

Emerged

A shoot and its first leaves clear the soil. There is more bare ground than crop in the frame, and soil brightness still dominates anything the camera measures.

Six leaves

The plant is stacking leaves and internodes fast. Nitrogen demand is about to climb, and this is the window where a sidedress decision still pays.

Canopy closes

Rows touch and the ground disappears. From here the canopy is dense enough that red-based indices start to lose their grip on differences.

Tasseling

The tassel pushes clear of the whorl. Leaf area is at its maximum and every leaf above the ear is now working directly on yield.

Silking

Silks emerge and the ear starts to fill. This is the most stress-sensitive fortnight of the whole season.

NDVI saturates

The canopy is now so dense that NDVI flattens out and stops separating a good field from a struggling one. Red-edge and wide dynamic range indices keep resolving.

Nitrogen shortfall

Supply falls behind demand. Nothing shows on the leaf yet, but canopy chlorophyll has already started to slip, and that is what the red edge reports.

Red edge shifts

The steep rise in reflectance near 700 nm slides toward shorter wavelengths. A multispectral camera reads this days before the color changes.

Lower leaves fire

The plant pulls nitrogen out of its oldest leaves to feed the ear. Yellowing runs back from the tip along the midrib in a V.

Firing climbs

The V-shaped yellowing works its way up the plant, one leaf at a time. Canopy chlorophyll is falling faster than canopy cover.

Common rust

Puccinia sorghi. Small cinnamon-brown pustules break through both leaf surfaces, each ringed by a pale chlorotic halo.

Rust spreads

Pustules multiply and the tissue around them yellows. Pigment ratios move before whole-canopy greenness does.

Southern rust

Puccinia polysora, the more aggressive one. Pustules crowd the upper surface and photosynthetic efficiency drops with them.

Gray leaf spot

Cercospora zeae-maydis. Lesions run long and rectangular because the parallel veins box them in.

Lesions coalesce

Individual lesions merge into gray-brown bands. Leaf spot severity tracks the red-edge and near-infrared bands most closely.

Northern leaf blight

Exserohilum turcicum. Long cigar-shaped gray-green lesions, big enough to take out whole sections of a blade.

Tar spot

Phyllachora maydis. Raised black stromata speckle the blade and do not rub off. They are dark enough to read in plain visible bands.

Blades roll

Water runs short and the leaves roll inward along the midrib to cut the surface facing the sun. Water absorption near 950 nm shallows as the tissue dries.

Water stress deepens

Rolling holds through the morning instead of relaxing overnight. Near-infrared scattering falls with the cell structure behind it.

Leaf area lost

Dead tissue is no longer photosynthesizing. Enough soil shows through the canopy that soil-adjusted indices start to matter again.

Senescence

The natural end of the season arrives on top of everything else. Pigments break down in order, chlorophyll first, carotenoids after.

Dry-down

Grain moisture falls. The water absorption features flatten out, which is the signal that says the crop is drying rather than dying.

Harvest

Grain corn is the one crop meant to come off dry, and the map that says which corner of the field is ready first is a moisture map, not a green one.

Change detected

Every stage since the seventh changed how this canopy reflects light. That is what our cameras measure, starting at the stage you could not see.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a rice crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole paddy.

Transplanted

Seedlings pushed by hand into puddled mud under a few centimeters of water, three or four to a hill. In the frame the field is water with a green stipple on it, and the water is what the camera sees first.

Tillering

Each seedling sends up side shoots from its base and the hill fills out. The water is brought up to five centimeters, and the fish go in with it: koi and carp that clear the weeds and the larvae between the hills.

Maximum tillering

The canopy closes over the water and the panicle starts forming, unseen, inside each stem. Nitrogen taken up now sets the number of grains, and red edge reports it before the color does.

Heading

The panicles push out of the flag leaf sheath, still green and standing straight up. Leaf area is at its peak and every leaf above the water is working on the grain.

Flowering

The spikelets open for a couple of hours around midday and the anthers hang out to shed pollen. A hot afternoon or a cold snap this week means empty hulls at harvest.

Milk stage

The grain fills with a white milky fluid and the heads start to lean. The paddy is a solid green sheet now, and NDVI has stopped separating a good block from a poor one.

Nitrogen shortfall

Supply falls behind the filling grain and the plant strips its oldest leaves to feed it. Nothing shows to the eye yet; canopy chlorophyll has already slipped, and red edge reports it.

Red edge shifts

The steep rise in reflectance near 700 nm slides toward shorter wavelengths as chlorophyll falls. A multispectral camera reads this days before the paddy looks any different.

Bronzing

Iron toxicity: flooded acid soil frees iron faster than the roots can keep it out, and tiny brown specks spread from the tips of the older leaves until they look rusted. The pigment ratios move first.

Leaf blast

Magnaporthe oryzae. Spindle-shaped lesions with gray centers and brown borders, lying along the blade. It comes in on warm wet nights, and it is the one disease every rice grower scouts for.

Neck blast

The fungus moves to the node under the panicle and rots it through. The head above whitens, empty, and hangs from the broken neck. Red edge and near-infrared carry most of the blast signal.

Sheath blight

Rhizoctonia solani, from sclerotia floating in the irrigation water. Oval gray-green lesions on the sheaths at the waterline, climbing tiller by tiller and hill to hill once the canopy closes over it.

Brown spot

Bipolaris oryzae. Oval brown spots with gray centers on the leaves, and dark blotches on the hulls. A disease of poor soil and short potassium, so a map of it is a map of the field's worst ground.

Bacterial leaf blight

Xanthomonas. Yellow-white lesions run back from the leaf tips along the margins behind a wavy front, and whole hills wilt. Water spreads it, so it follows the flow across the paddy.

Tungro

A virus carried by the green leafhopper. Infected hills turn yellow-orange from the leaf tips down and stop growing, in patches that spread out from where the hoppers first landed.

Stem borer

The larva bores in and cuts the stem from the inside. A head cut after it formed dries to a whitehead, empty and bleached, standing straight up among the bending ones.

Paddy dries out

The dry spell outlasts the supply and the water is gone. The mud cracks, the blades roll along their midribs, and the fish crowd into what water is left in the deepest corner.

Water stress deepens

Rolled leaves through the morning and the filling grain shut off. The near-infrared water bands separate before the leaf shows it, and a field with no standing water reads as land in every band.

Reflooded, dough stage

The rain comes back and the paddy fills. The grain hardens from milk to dough and the heads bend right over under it; chlorophyll leaves the canopy from the top down.

Field drained

The water is let out ten days before harvest so the mud firms up for the combine, and the fish come out with it. A water index over the field goes from water to land in a week.

Mature grain

The hulls are straw gold and hard, and most of the canopy has gone with them. The combine goes in at about twenty percent grain moisture, and the map that times it is a moisture map.

Harvest

Cut and threshed, the straw left as stubble a hand high. What the camera sees now is mud, stubble and the bunds, and the count of what is left tells the next crop's story.

Stubble and residue

The straw left on the field carries the blast and the sheath blight through to the next crop: the spores and the sclerotia wait on it. Where the residue lies is where next season starts.

Change detected

One paddy, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a wheat crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole field.

Emergence

Drilled in rows and up in a fortnight, a seedling every few centimeters. Most of what the camera sees is bare soil, and the mice have already been along the rows after the seed.

Tillering

Each plant sends up side shoots from its base and the rows thicken. The number of tillers that go on to carry a head is set now, by light, water and nitrogen.

Stem extension

The stem lengthens node by node and the rows close over the ground. Nitrogen taken up now builds the canopy the grain will fill from, and red edge reports it first.

Heading

The ears push out of the flag leaf sheath, bearded with awns, green and upright. Leaf area is at its peak and the flag leaf alone will fill most of the grain.

Flowering

The anthers hang out of the spikelets for a few days. Rain now is what lets the head blight in, and a hot wind now is what leaves florets empty.

Milk stage

The grain fills with a white fluid and the ears grow heavy. The field is a solid green sheet, and NDVI has stopped separating a good block from a poor one.

Nitrogen shortfall

Supply falls behind the filling grain and the plant strips its oldest leaves to feed it. Nothing shows to the eye yet; canopy chlorophyll has already slipped, and red edge reports it.

Red edge shifts

The steep rise in reflectance near 700 nm slides toward shorter wavelengths as chlorophyll falls. A multispectral camera reads this days before the field looks any different.

Sulfur deficiency

The youngest leaves pale first, not the oldest: sulfur does not move within the plant the way nitrogen does. Pigment ratios tell the two apart before a lab does.

Yellow rust

Puccinia striiformis. Yellow-orange pustules in stripes along the leaf veins, in patches that spread outward. It likes cool wet springs, and it takes yield fast.

Brown rust

Puccinia triticina. Small orange-brown pustules scattered over the upper leaf, arriving as the weather warms. Red edge and near-infrared carry most of the rust signal.

Septoria

Zymoseptoria tritici. Tan blotches with rows of black pycnidia, splashed up from the lower leaves by rain, leaf by leaf toward the flag leaf that fills the grain.

Powdery mildew

White fluffy pustules on the lower leaves in a thick crop, going gray as they age. It is pale enough to read in plain visible bands.

Head blight

Fusarium. Spikelets bleach early in the green ear, some with a salmon tint, and the grain behind them shrivels and carries the toxin. Rain at flowering let it in.

Yellow dwarf

A virus the aphids carry in from the grass. Leaf tips go yellow and then purple-red, the plant stays short, in patches that grew from where the aphids first landed.

Take-all

A root fungus that blackens the crown and cuts the water off. The ear above bleaches white and empty, standing straight up, in patches that a map finds before the harvest.

Drought

The topsoil dries and cracks and the leaves roll along their midribs to cut the surface facing the sun. Water absorption near 950 nm shallows as the tissue dries.

Water stress deepens

Rolled leaves through the morning and the grain fill shut off early. Near-infrared scattering falls with the cell structure behind it.

Dough stage

Rain comes back too late for the grain. The ears go gold and the canopy senesces from the top down; chlorophyll leaves first and carotenoid is what remains.

Lodging

A storm lays a patch flat, stems bent at the base, ears on the ground. The combine cannot pick them up, and the mice can.

Mice in the crop

A dry autumn and a mild winter, and the mice have bred all season. They climb the stems and cut the ears, and the ground under the crop is littered with chewed heads.

Harvest

The combine goes in at about fourteen percent grain moisture and leaves the stubble a hand high. The map that times it is a moisture map, not a green one.

Stubble and residue

Straw and spilled grain on the ground, and the mice in it. The rust and the Septoria wait on the residue for the next crop, and so do the mice.

Change detected

One field, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a soybean canopy changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole field.

Emergence

VE. The hypocotyl hooks up through the crust and pulls the two cotyledons out behind it, five to ten days after planting. A survey now is a stand count: plants per foot of row, and the gaps.

Unifoliolate

VC. The cotyledons open and the first pair of simple leaves unrolls opposite each other above them. The seedling still lives off the seed; the nodules that will feed it are just forming on the root.

First trifoliolates

V1 to V3. A three-leaflet leaf at every node above the unifoliolates, a new one every three to five days. The nodules start fixing nitrogen at V2, and from here the crop makes most of its own.

Iron chlorosis

V3 to V5. On high-pH ground the newest trifoliolates come out yellow between green veins: iron deficiency chlorosis. It maps as patches that follow the soil, and the scoring is done from the map.

Canopy closes

V6 to V8. Branches push out of the lowest axils and the rows meet in the middles. From here the ground is gone from the pixel, and red edge is what separates a well-fed canopy from a full one.

Beginning bloom

R1. The first purple or white flower opens at a lower node. An indeterminate soybean flowers and grows at once, so the top of the plant keeps adding nodes while the bottom sets pods.

Full bloom

R2. An open flower at one of the two top nodes, and racemes all the way up the stem. The plant is still adding nodes, and nitrogen fixation peaks over the next three weeks.

Beginning pod

R3. A pod three-sixteenths of an inch long at one of the four top nodes. From here to R6 is the yield window: stress now costs pods, later it costs seeds per pod, then seed size.

Full pod

R4. A pod three-quarters of an inch long at one of the four top nodes, and the most stress-sensitive stage of the season: a dry week here takes more yield than at any other time.

Potassium shortfall

The margins of the older leaves yellow, then scorch, while the veins hold green. Potassium is pulled to the pods out of the leaves that feed them, and a short field shows it in the mid-canopy first.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per leaf slips as the pods start to pull nitrogen out of the canopy and the nodules fall behind. The red edge inflection slides toward the blue; a scout sees nothing yet.

Defoliators

Japanese beetles skeletonize the top leaves between the veins; bean leaf beetles cut round holes lower down. The threshold is 20 percent of the leaf area from R1 to R5, and a map is how you measure it.

Septoria brown spot

Small dark brown spots on the lowest leaves, the tissue between them yellowing until the leaf drops. It climbs in a wet August; yield goes when it reaches the upper canopy, and the map says how high it is.

Frogeye leaf spot

Cercospora sojina. Round lesions on the young upper leaves, a gray heart in a red-purple border. It is a fungicide decision at R3, and strobilurin resistance is now common across the Corn Belt.

Soybean aphid

Colonies on the undersides of the newest leaves, honeydew and sooty mold on the ones below, the tops cupped. The threshold is 250 aphids a plant and climbing, from R1 to R5.

Sudden death syndrome

Fusarium virguliforme, in the roots since spring. Yellow between the veins, then dead tissue between veins that stay green, and the leaflets drop while the petioles stay on the stem.

White mold

Sclerotinia came in through the flowers in a cool wet July. A branch bleaches bone-white above the lesion, fluffy mycelium and black sclerotia on it, and everything above it wilts and dies.

Soybean rust

Phakopsora pachyrhizi. Tiny tan pustules on the undersides of the lower leaves, yellowing above them, and the canopy drops from the bottom up. It blows in late; the map says how far up it has come.

Drought and charcoal rot

A hot dry spell: the leaflets roll and turn their pale undersides to the sun, and Macrophomina greys the lower stem and speckles it black. Plants die early with their leaves still on.

Cercospora leaf blight

R6. The pods are full of green seed and the sun-facing top leaves go bronze-purple and leathery: Cercospora kikuchii, the fungus that stains the seed purple. Senescence indices move first.

Beginning maturity

R7. One pod on the main stem has reached its mature tan. The leaves yellow fast now, and nitrogen leaves them for the seed, which is why a soybean field goes gold in a week.

Full maturity

R8. Ninety-five percent of the pods are at their mature color and the leaves are down. Five to ten more drying days bring the seed to 13 percent moisture, ready for the combine.

Harvest

The combine takes the plant off at the stubble. Shatter losses climb with every day the pods stand dry, and the map that schedules the field is a moisture map of the standing crop.

Change detected

One plant, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a vine changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole block.

Dormant wood

Bare cordon and canes, pruned and tied down. Everything the camera sees is wood, cover crop and bare ground, which is exactly the baseline the season gets measured against.

Bud break

Shoots push and the first leaves unfold. Canopy is a few percent of the frame, so soil brightness still drives anything the camera reads.

Shoots extend

Leaf area climbs fast on stored reserves. This is the window where a vigor map still changes what you do about irrigation and canopy work.

Flowering

Fruit set is decided in a fortnight, and it is decided by canopy condition. Vigor differences you map now are the yield differences you weigh at harvest.

Fruit set

Berries the size of shot, and the canopy is filling the trellis. Row structure still puts bare ground in half the pixels, so a soil-adjusted index reads truer.

Canopy fills

The wall closes and NDVI flattens out near its ceiling. Vigor differences that matter for a block map are still there, but broadband red will not show them.

Water deficit begins

Mild deficit is deliberate in wine grapes, and the difference between deliberate and damaging is a number, not a hunch. Near-infrared water bands move first.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per unit leaf starts to fall and the red edge slides toward the blue. Its position is a measurement, not an impression.

Veraison

Berries soften and color, and anthocyanin climbs in skin and, on some varieties, in leaf. Green and red edge ratios pick that up while the canopy still reads green.

Nitrogen shortfall

Older basal leaves pale first as nitrogen moves to the fruit. Red edge separates a nitrogen story from a water story where NDVI cannot.

Powdery mildew

Ash-gray colonies on leaf and berry. The tissue underneath loses pigment before it loses structure, which is a carotenoid ratio, not a greenness one.

Downy mildew

Oil spots on the upper surface, white growth beneath. Interveinal tissue collapses while the veins hold, so the change is patchy at leaf scale.

Botrytis in the fruit

Bunch rot starts inside a tight cluster, hidden from the camera. What the camera can see is the canopy microclimate that lets it start.

Harvest

Fruit comes off while the canopy is still working. What is left has to fill next year's buds, and its condition now sets next season's start.

Post-harvest canopy

The vine is carrying no crop and every leaf it keeps is going into reserves. Blocks that lose their canopy now start next spring behind.

Mildew spreads

Lesions run together and whole leaves go. Now it is a canopy-area problem as well as a pigment one, and both indices should move together.

Leafroll virus

Reddening between the veins on a red variety, yellowing on a white one, always on the older leaves first. Anthocyanin indices see it earliest.

Trunk disease

Esca and eutypa cut a vine's water supply from inside the wood. The symptom above ground is a vine that transpires less than its neighbors.

Heat event

A run of hot days closes stomata and the vine stops fixing carbon. Nothing in the greenness moves for days; photochemical reflectance moves within hours.

Autumn color

Chlorophyll goes first and carotenoid and anthocyanin are what is left: the margins redden, then the tissue between the veins. This is the pigment ratio the senescence indices were built for.

Leaf area lost

The canopy opens up. Bare ground and cover crop come back into the pixels, and soil-adjusted indices hold their meaning while NDVI drifts.

Leaves fall

The rest of the canopy comes down and litters the row. In the frame the block is now cover crop, bare ground and a drift of brown leaf, and every index has to be read that way.

Pruned to the cordon

The canes are cut back and the vine is wood again. The camera is reading what it read at dormancy, wood and cover crop and bare ground, and the difference between those two readings is the season.

Change detected

One block, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands an orange tree changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole grove.

A grove in leaf

A mature tree in a hedged row, in leaf all year. Evergreen means the baseline is a full canopy, so every change from here is a change in the leaf, not in whether it is there.

Spring flush

Most of the year's new leaf comes in one push in early spring, pale and soft on every shoot tip. The flush is what the psyllid and the leafminer are waiting for.

Bloom

White blossom in the leaf axils, the whole grove in a week, and bees set out for it. The count of flowers is the first estimate of the crop.

Petal fall, fruit set

Tiny green fruit where the flowers were. Water now decides how many of them hold, so irrigation at set is the one that pays.

June drop

The tree sheds what it cannot carry, and what stays is the crop. A stressed block sheds more, and the map shows which blocks were stressed.

Fruit sizes

Green fruit swelling through the summer inside a closed hedgerow. In the frame the rows are one canopy, and red edge is what still tells trees apart.

Zinc and manganese

Yellow between green veins on the new leaves, the mottle of the two citrus deficiencies growers spray for. Pigment ratios pick it up while the old leaves still read green.

Nitrogen

Whole-leaf paling, the oldest leaves first, and small fruit to follow. Red edge separates a feeding problem from a water problem before either shows in broadband red.

Color break

Cool nights strip the green from the rind and the orange comes through, block by block. Rind color is a measurement before it is a picking decision.

Harvest

Fruit matures only on the tree, so it is sampled for sugar and acid and then picked by hand from ladders. Ripeness maps say which blocks to send the crews to first.

Greening appears

Huanglongbing: a blotchy, lopsided yellow mottle on a few leaves, and a yellow shoot standing out of a green tree. The psyllid brought it; the map finds the tree.

Canker

Raised corky lesions with yellow halos on leaf and fruit, spread by wind-driven rain. It follows the weather across a grove, and so does the map.

Greasy spot

Yellow-brown blisters on the undersides, chlorosis on top, and the leaf drops early. A fungus of wet summers that shows first as lost canopy area.

Black spot

Hard dark spots on the rind, fruit dropping before it is picked, worst in the humid blocks. The loss is on the fruit, and the map is of where the humidity sat.

Leafminer

Silver serpentine mines wander through the flush leaves, pale against the green. Canker gets in through the wounds, so the two maps are worth laying over each other.

Scale and sooty mold

Scale feeding under the leaves, and a black mold growing on what they leave behind. The canopy darkens in every band at once, which is its own signature.

Phytophthora

Gum weeping from cracked bark at the foot of the trunk, roots rotting in wet soil underneath. The tree above loses water transport long before it loses leaves.

Drought

Leaves cup and curl and the stomata shut by mid-morning. The reflectance effect arrives the same week; the size of next year's fruit is decided by it.

Water stress deepens

Leaf water content drops and the near-infrared water bands separate. Sandy ridge blocks stop looking like the flatwoods blocks next to them.

Greening advances

Twigs die back, the fruit that set stays small, lopsided and green, and drops. What began as a few mottled leaves is now the whole tree.

Canopy thins

Leaves drop and the tree opens. Ground comes back into pixels that had been pure canopy for years, and soil-adjusted indices hold their meaning.

Decline

Chlorophyll breaks down in the leaf that is left and carotenoid is what remains. The senescence ratios were built for this transition, on a tree that never had a fall.

A tree to replace

Bare wood and a scatter of yellow leaf in a row of green trees. The replant decision is a tree count, and a survey counts every tree in the grove in a morning.

Change detected

One grove, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a cane crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole block.

Planting

Setts laid in the furrow, two or three buds to a piece, and covered over. Most of what the camera sees is bare soil, and the rats have already found the row.

Germination

A shoot from every bud, up through the soil in three weeks. A gap in the row shows now and stays for the season, and the next one.

Tillering

Each shoot sends up more from its base and the stool fills out. The number of stalks that reach the mill is set now, by light, water and nitrogen.

Grand growth

The stalks stretch an internode a week and the row closes over. Nitrogen taken up now builds the canopy the cane will fill from, and red edge reports it first.

Canopy closure

Leaf on leaf, three meters up, and the ground goes into shade. The block is a solid green sheet, and NDVI has stopped separating a good stool from a poor one.

Nitrogen shortfall

Supply falls behind the growing cane and the plant strips its oldest leaves to feed it. Nothing shows to the eye yet; canopy chlorophyll has already slipped, and red edge reports it.

Red edge shifts

The steep rise in reflectance near 700 nm slides toward shorter wavelengths as chlorophyll falls. A multispectral camera reads this days before the block looks any different.

Iron chlorosis

The youngest leaves stripe pale between their veins on the limy ground, and green up again once the roots reach down. Pigment ratios tell it from nitrogen before a lab does.

Orange rust

Puccinia kuehnii. Orange pustules in lines along the veins of the older leaves, in patches that spread down the row in a warm wet spell. It takes sugar fast.

Brown rust

Puccinia melanocephala. Small red-brown pustules scattered over the blade, worst on the leaves that are already old. Red edge and near-infrared carry most of the rust signal.

Yellow leaf

A virus the aphids carry stool to stool. The midrib goes bright yellow and the blade yellows back from it; the stalk stays short and low in sugar, and nothing shows until the crop is half grown.

Mosaic

Sugarcane mosaic virus, in the setts and then in the aphids. The young leaves mottle pale and dark green in streaks along the blade, stool by stool where the infected seed went in.

Red rot

Colletotrichum falcatum. Dark red lesions along the midrib, then the stalk itself reddens inside, white patches across the grain of it, and the top dries from the third leaf down.

Smut

Sporisorium scitamineum. A long black whip out of the spindle, curling over and shedding its spores down the row. The stalk it grows from is thin and grassy and makes no sugar.

Pokkah boeng

Fusarium in the spindle. The young leaves come out pale and wrinkled at the base, twisted, sometimes cut off square; in a bad case the top rots and the stalk is a stump.

Stalk borer

The moth lays on the leaf and the larva bores in at a node. Holes and frass on the rind, tunnels through the internodes, and where it reaches the spindle the top dies: a dead heart.

Rats in the cane

A closed canopy is cover, and the rats breed under it all season. They gnaw the rind low on the stalk down to the pith, the stalk sours and breaks, and the holes at the row ends tell you where to look.

Drought

The topsoil dries and cracks and the leaves roll along their midribs to cut the surface facing the sun. Water absorption near 950 nm shallows as the tissue dries.

Lodging

A storm lays a patch over, the stalks bent at the base and leaning on each other. They keep growing, crooked, and the harvester takes them at a cost.

Arrowing

The short days bring the flower: a silver plume out of the top of a share of the stalks. A stalk that arrows stops growing, and the sugar in it starts to go.

Ripening

The dry-off: water is held back, the canopy yellows from the bottom, and the stalks store sugar instead of growing. The cane is at its sweetest a few weeks before it is cut.

Harvest

The harvester cuts the stalk at the ground, tops it under the green leaves and blows the trash back onto the row. A moisture map sets the order the blocks come in.

Ratoon

The stubble sends up new shoots through the trash within weeks, and the rats are back in the row before them. The next crop is this one again, without planting.

Change detected

One block, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a potato crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole field.

Ridges hilled

Seed pieces are in the ground and the rows are hilled over them. Every pixel is bare loam, and that is the baseline the season is measured against. The cut shows the seed piece and nothing else yet.

Emergence

Sprouts break the ridge. Crop is a few percent of the frame and the soil-adjusted indices are the honest ones while the ridges still show.

Canopy grows

Stems rise and the compound leaves unfold pair by pair. A gap in the row now is a seed piece that rotted, and it never fills in.

Tuber initiation

Stolon tips swell under the ridge. The camera cannot see a tuber; it sees the canopy that will fill it, and canopy at initiation sets how many tubers you get.

Flowering

White stars with yellow anthers open at the stem tips. Flowering marks the start of bulking, and bulking is a nitrogen question the red edge can answer.

Tuber bulking

The tubers swell underground and the canopy above them is the engine. NDVI saturates in a full canopy; the wide-dynamic-range form keeps reading.

Nitrogen shortfall

Bulking drains nitrogen from the leaves into the tubers. Older leaves pale first, and red edge separates that from a water problem.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per unit leaf falls and the red edge inflection slides toward the blue. Its position is a measurement you can trend week to week.

Early blight

Target spots with concentric rings on the older, lower leaves, worst where the nitrogen ran short. Each one is small; together they are leaf area lost.

Late blight

Water-soaked lesions spread in from the margins with a white bloom underneath. Phytophthora takes a field in a week of wet weather; the camera sees the first hot spot.

Blight in the tubers

Spores wash down the stems into the ridge and the rot shows in the cut: reddish brown under the skin, granular inside. What the camera can map is the canopy it came from.

Colorado potato beetle

Larvae eat the leaves in from the margins and can strip a plant. Defoliation is a cover question, and the visible-band ratios pick it up early.

Mosaic virus

Light and dark green mottle on half the plants, carried in by aphids and out in the seed. Pigment goes before the leaf changes shape enough to count.

Blackleg

The stem base goes black and soft and the plant above it wilts. A plant that has stopped taking up water shows it before it collapses.

Verticillium wilt

Early dying: one side of the plant yellows and wilts while the other stays green. It maps as a patch that ages weeks ahead of the rest of the field.

Common scab

Corky lesions on the tubers in the cut, worst in dry, alkaline ground at tuber set. The camera maps the dry patches where it lives.

Black scurf

Rhizoctonia's black sclerotia on the tuber skin, the dirt that does not wash off. It came in on the seed and it comes out in the yield map.

Water stress

A blocked pivot nozzle is invisible from the row and obvious on the map. The leaves roll along the midrib and the ridge cracks; the water bands see it first.

Tubers greening

Rain washes the ridge down and a shallow tuber is in the light, turning green with solanine. Exposed ridge is a soil signal in a canopy that is thinning.

Haulm senescence

Chlorophyll breaks down and the leaves go yellow then brown. The red edge slides and the senescence ratios were built for exactly this transition.

Vine kill

The haulm is killed or flails itself dead and goes over onto the ridge. Canopy cover collapses and the skins start to set underneath.

Skin set

Two weeks of dead vines and the tubers hold their skin. Bare ridge is the whole frame now, and the residue map says where the vines fell.

Harvest

The digger lifts the row. What is in the cut is what the season made, blight, scab and all, and the camera saw every step of it coming.

Change detected

One field, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a strawberry crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole block.

Beds laid

Raised beds under black plastic, drip tape buried, holes punched. Every pixel is mulch and bare alley, and that is the baseline the season is measured against.

Crowns set

Transplants go into the holes. Crop is a few percent of the frame and the plastic beneath it is dark, which pulls broadband indices around.

Leaves expand

Trifoliate leaves unfold and the rosettes start to cover the bed. Soil-adjusted indices are the honest ones while the plastic still shows.

First flowers

White flowers open at the edge of each crown. Every one of them is a berry if the plant can carry it, and carrying it is a canopy question.

Green fruit

Berries set and swell green under the leaves. Canopy demand and fruit demand are now competing for the same nitrogen.

Bed covered

The rosettes meet across the bed and the plastic disappears. NDVI stops rising even though the crop has not stopped growing.

Fruit colors

White turns pink turns red as anthocyanin builds in the berry. A canopy index will not see it; a pigment index will.

First pick

Harvest starts and does not stop for months. Each pick takes fruit off and leaves the plant to build the next flush.

Nitrogen shortfall

Continuous picking is a continuous nitrogen drain. Older leaves pale first, and red edge separates that from a water problem.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per unit leaf falls and the red edge inflection slides toward the blue. Its position is a measurement you can trend week to week.

Powdery mildew

Leaf margins curl upward and a white bloom appears underneath. Pigment goes before the leaf changes shape enough to count.

Leaf spot

Purple-bordered spots scatter across the older leaves. Each one is small; together they are a measurable loss of functioning leaf.

Botrytis in the fruit

Gray mold takes fruit in the field and again in the cooler. What the camera can map is the dense, slow-drying canopy that lets it start.

Anthracnose

Sunken lesions on fruit and crown, worst after warm rain. Plants that lose their crown stop transpiring, and that shows before they collapse.

Two-spotted mite

Stippling on the underside, bronzing on top, hot dry corners of the block first. The visible-band ratios pick up bronzing early.

Salt builds up

Drip irrigation under plastic concentrates salts in the bed. Leaf margins burn and the plant stops taking up water it can see.

Water stress

A blocked emitter is invisible from the row and obvious on the map. Near-infrared water bands separate the beds that are getting water from the ones that are not.

Crown rot

Phytophthora takes the crown from below. The first sign above ground is a plant that wilts in the afternoon and never quite recovers.

Last pick

Fruit size drops, picks get lighter and the crew moves on. Canopy condition and pick weight have tracked each other all season, and both are going the same way.

Leaf area lost

Rosettes collapse onto the bed and the canopy stops standing up. Soil-adjusted indices hold their meaning against the dark plastic while NDVI drifts.

Beds thin

Whole crowns drop out and the row goes patchy. A gap map now is a replant plan for next season.

Senescence

Chlorophyll breaks down and the leaves go yellow then brown. The senescence ratios were built for exactly this transition.

Bed spent

Dead leaf lies flat over the plastic and nothing is left to pick. What the camera measures now is which beds gave out first, and where.

Change detected

One block, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a blueberry bush changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole planting.

Dormant bush

Bare red canes on bare ground, the fruit buds fat at the tips of last year's wood. A winter survey counts bushes and gaps while nothing hides them.

Bud swell

Flower buds loosen and the first leaf buds show green. Bud stages are how growers time frost protection, and they run bush by bush.

Bloom

White bells hang in clusters as the first leaves open. Pollination in these two weeks sets the crop, and a frost tonight takes it.

Fruit set

Petals drop and a green berry sits where each bell was. Nitrogen demand jumps as leaf and fruit expand together.

Canopy fills

The bush leafs out to its full canopy and the rows read as solid green. Red edge is what separates a well-fed bush from a full one.

Green fruit

Berries size in tight clusters at the tips. Fruit load and leaf now compete, and the fertigation decision here is this year's yield.

Nitrogen shortfall

The older leaves pale and pick up a red tinge as the fruit pulls nitrogen out of them. Red edge separates a feeding problem from a water one while a top-up still helps.

Iron chlorosis

Soil pH has crept up and the young leaves yellow between green veins. A blueberry wants acid ground, and this is the map of where it does not have it.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per leaf falls and the red edge inflection slides toward the blue. Its position is a measurement, not an impression.

Mummy berry

Monilinia strikes the new shoots first, then rides the bees into the flowers; the berries it takes turn tan, shrivel and drop. The map is of where the spring stayed wet.

Color break

Green goes pink goes blue, berry by berry, as anthocyanin builds under the skin. Ripeness is a color measurement before it is a picking decision.

Fruit rot

Botrytis and anthracnose spoil ripe berries in a wet spell, a gray fuzz or an orange ooze. The loss is in the fruit; the map is of the humid corners.

Ripening

The clusters go fully blue under their waxy bloom and sugar climbs. Ripeness maps tell you which blocks the pickers go to first.

First pick

Pickers take the ripe berries and leave the rest to color. A bush is picked over three or four times, and the map schedules every pass.

Leaf rust

Yellow flecks on the upper surface and orange pustules beneath, on the oldest leaves first. Green ratios flag infected bushes before a scout would.

Second pick

The last of the crop comes off and the bush is back to leaf. What is left of the canopy now feeds next year's fruit buds.

Leaf spot

Septoria puts small tan spots with purple borders on the lower leaves, and they drop early. A bush that loses leaf now sets fewer buds.

Heat and drought

Leaf margins scorch brown and the blade reddens from the edge in as a shallow root system runs dry. Photochemical reflectance moves within hours of the stress.

Stem blight

Botryosphaeria girdles one cane and it flags: every leaf on it goes red-brown and stays. One cane per bush is a pruning job; one bush per row is a map.

Water stress

Leaf water content drops and the near-infrared water bands separate. Blocks on sand stop looking like blocks on loam.

Fall color

Anthocyanin floods the leaves and the planting turns crimson. The senescence ratios were built for this transition, and it runs bush by bush.

Leaf drop

Leaves let go and the canes show through. Ground comes back into every pixel, and soil-adjusted indices hold their meaning.

Dormant again

Back to bare canes, a season of berries later, next year's fruit buds already set. A survey now maps every gap before the pruning crew goes in.

Change detected

One planting, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a tomato crop changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole field.

Transplanted

Plants go in on wide row spacing. There is far more soil than crop in the frame, and soil brightness dominates anything the camera measures.

Establishment

New roots take hold and the first true leaves expand. Gaps in the stand now are gaps you still have time to replant.

Vine climbs

The leader runs up the string and leaf area doubles every week. Nitrogen demand is climbing with it, and a fertigation change still pays here.

First flowers

Yellow trusses open on the lower nodes. Fruit set depends on canopy condition and on temperature, and only one of those is yours to change.

Fruit set

Green fruit swells on the first trusses. The plant is now splitting everything it fixes between new leaf and fruit.

Canopy closes

Rows meet and NDVI runs into its ceiling. Real differences between beds are still there; broadband red simply cannot resolve them any more.

Nitrogen shortfall

Fruit load pulls nitrogen out of the oldest leaves first. Red edge separates a feeding problem from a watering problem while there is still time to fix it.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per unit leaf falls and the red edge inflection slides. Its position is a measurement you can trend, not an impression.

Fruit colors

Green fruit turns through yellow and orange to red as lycopene builds. The canopy still reads green; the crop underneath it has changed completely.

Lower leaves pale

The bottom of the canopy is shaded, old and being stripped for the fruit above it. Green ratios catch that layer before whole-canopy greenness does.

Early blight

Target-shaped lesions with concentric rings, lowest leaves first. Pigment goes in the halo around each lesion before the lesion itself is countable.

Blight climbs

Lesions coalesce and defoliation works up the plant. Now it is a leaf-area problem as well as a pigment one.

First harvest

The first trusses come off a canopy that is still mostly green. Picking now runs every few days, and what the plant can still fill is a canopy question.

Late blight

Water-soaked patches that go brown and greasy in a day. It moves at the speed of the weather, so the map has to be fresh to be worth anything.

Bacterial spot

Small dark angular spots, worst where the canopy stays wet. Whole-canopy indices flatten out; the visible-band ratios still separate affected beds.

Sunscald risk

Fruit that loses its leaf cover cooks on the exposed side. Canopy cover over the fruit zone is now a quality measurement, not an agronomic one.

Virus symptoms

A yellow-green mottle on the growing tips, spread by whitefly from the field edge in. The pattern on the map tells you as much as the symptom does.

Wilt at midday

The plant recovers overnight and wilts again by noon. Stomata are closing, and the carbon it is not fixing shows up in the photochemical ratio first.

Last harvest

The final picks clear the vine. Fruit left on a plant that cannot ripen it is a number the map can give you before you send a crew.

Leaves droop

Turgor is gone and the canopy folds down over the fruit. Less leaf pointed at the sky changes the reflectance geometry as well as the biology.

Water stress

Leaf water content drops and the near-infrared water bands separate. Irrigation zones that looked identical stop looking identical.

Leaf area lost

Defoliation opens the rows and bare bed comes back into the pixels. Soil-adjusted indices keep their meaning while NDVI drifts.

Senescence

Chlorophyll breaks down and carotenoid is all that is left in the leaf. The senescence ratios were built for exactly this transition.

Change detected

One field, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a lettuce leaf changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole bench.

Sown

One pelleted seed to a cell, eighteen cells to a tray, six trays to the bench, into moist peat at 68 F. Everything the camera sees is black plastic and dark mix: the baseline the next five weeks are measured against.

Emergence

The radicle is down and the hypocotyl hooks up out of the mix with the two cotyledons, forty-eight hours after sowing at 77 F. A survey now is a stand count: which cells came up, and which did not.

First true leaves

The first true leaf opens between the cotyledons on day five, rounded and already a lettuce leaf, the second unfolding behind it. The roots have reached the cell walls.

Damping-off

Pythium in the corner where the tray sat low and wet: three seedlings go water-soaked at the media line and topple with their tops still green. Rare in a clean house, and the cells stay empty for the crop.

Rosette

Six leaves at three weeks, a rosette three inches across: the first leaves flat on the mix, each new one steeper and inside the last. The plant now grows on what it makes, not on what the seed held.

Rosettes fill
the cells

Leaf eight, and each rosette is wider than its cell, the mix still showing between them. Another week and the neighbors touch; from here the red edge is what separates a well-fed head from a merely full one.

Nitrogen shortfall

The fertigation ran weak for a week and the older leaves pale evenly, whole leaves rather than veins: nitrogen leaving them for the heart. A soilless mix holds nothing back, so the crop shows it within days.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per leaf slips a few percent more and the steep rise near 700 nm slides toward the blue. A multispectral camera reads it days before a grower sees a color.

Iron chlorosis

The pH of the mix has drifted past 6.5 and iron locks up: the youngest leaves come out yellow between green veins, almost white in the heart. Ten days of it, until the acid injector is set right.

Aphids

Foxglove aphids, pale green with dark shoulders, deep in the young leaves of four heads by the door: puckered, curled leaves, honeydew on the ones below and sooty mold on the honeydew. A colony, not a bench.

Pythium root rot

In the wet end the roots have browned and the cortex slips off in a rat-tail. Four heads sit stunted at half size, outer leaves yellow and limp in the afternoon. Warm water and low oxygen, and it travels in the solution.

Downy mildew

Bremia lactucae, in the cool damp end by the pad. Pale angular patches bounded by the veins on the older leaves, a white down on their undersides, browning and drying a card later. Airborne, so the focus grows.

Gray mold

Botrytis cinerea where a drip emitter leaked: a water-soaked brown rot at the base of the outer leaves lying on the wet mix, gray fuzz over it, and the head slumps onto the tray. Two heads, and under a closed canopy it spreads to the neighbors.

Lettuce drop

Sclerotinia. One head in the middle of the bench wilts flat in two days, a white cotton of mycelium at the crown with black sclerotia in it like mustard seed. Airborne spores and leaf-to-leaf contact carry it to the neighbors.

Powdery mildew

Golovinomyces, in the warm dry end by the heater: white patches of fungus on the upper side of the older leaves, joining into a gray-white powder as the heads mature. Dry days and humid nights, and it walks down the house.

Edge burn

The row along the aisle stands in the draft of the fans. Salts collect where the veins end at the margins of the older leaves and the tissue there scorches tan, a ragged burnt edge. High EC and dry air, not a disease.

Tipburn

The number one disorder of greenhouse lettuce. The fastest-growing heads cannot move calcium into the young leaves of the heart fast enough on a bright day, and their margins die brown. In a closed head you only find it with a knife.

Heat stress

Three days over 85 F under the glass. Every head wilts in the afternoon, the outer leaves limp on the trays, and stands up again by morning with a scorched edge to show for it. The stunted heads at the wet end do not stand up.

Bolting

The heat did it: three heads in the warmest tray push a stalk up out of the heart, the leaves spaced up it and a loose head of small yellow flowers at the top. Latex in the stem, and bitter to the tongue.

Harvest weight

Thirty-five days from the seed and five ounces a head, the heart firm and the wrapper leaves just starting to yellow. From here a day on the bench is a day off the shelf.

Harvest

Cut at the base above the mix, tray by tray down the bench, the root plug left in the cell. The culls go too: the molds, the drop, the bolters. A map of the bench the morning before decides which trays are ready.

Bench cleared

The trays are dumped and washed in dilute bleach, and the bench with them: the sclerotia and the spores of this crop must not meet the next one. A bare bench is the cleanest thing in the house.

Resown

Fresh mix, fresh seed, the cotyledons up in every cell three days later. A greenhouse turns a bench eight to ten times a year, and every turn is a new baseline for the camera.

Change detected

One bench, one crop, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to the last turn, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a turfgrass leaf changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole green.

Sod laid

Ultradwarf bermudagrass sod rolled out over a USGA rootzone: twelve inches of sand on a gravel bed, and nothing under the turf that holds water. The seams between the rolls are the first thing a camera sees.

Roots knit

Two weeks and the roots are into the sand, the seams closing as the runners cross them. A survey now maps which rolls took and which sit loose on the rootzone.

First irrigation

A rotor head rises out of the collar and throws its arc over the green. Sand holds a day of water at most, so the turf lives on what the heads put down: beyond their reach it is on its own.

Mowed down

The green comes down to an eighth of an inch, the collar to three eighths, the rough left at two inches. Mowing height is what separates the three in every index from here on.

Green opens

The cup is cut, the flag goes in and the first balls land. Bermudagrass at full density is a canopy the camera reads like any other crop: it just never gets taller.

Nitrogen shortfall

A sand rootzone leaches, and the green goes pale and slow two weeks after the last spoon feed, whole leaves rather than veins. The rough on native soil holds its color longer.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll slips a few percent more and the steep rise near 700 nm slides toward the blue. A multispectral camera reads it days before the superintendent sees a color.

Localized dry spot

Past the head's throw the sand has gone hydrophobic: water beads on it and runs off. The turf there wilts blue-gray by noon and goes straw within days, in patches the shape of the dry sand.

Dollar spot

Clarireedia: straw-colored spots the size of a dollar coin across the green, each leaf in them cut by a tan hourglass lesion with a brown edge. Dew, warm nights and a hungry turf bring it on.

Large patch

Rhizoctonia in the collar and the rough: circles a yard across with a bronze, smoky edge where the fungus works inward, the middle thinning to bare thatch. Cool wet weather and a wet thatch.

Pythium root rot

In the low turf by the water the roots have browned and the cortex slips off. The green thins and yellows there in irregular patches, worst where the surface stays wet.

Take-all root rot

Gaeumannomyces on the ultradwarf: irregular yellow patches a foot to a yard across, the turf thin and bronzed, the roots black and rotten when a plug is pulled. Summer stress opens the door.

Mini ring

Waitea: rings the size of a dinner plate on the green, each a narrow band of dead turf round a green center, a dozen of them after a week of heat. An ultradwarf's own disease.

Sting nematodes

Belonolaimus in the sand: roots pruned to stubs, and the turf over them yellow, thin and wilting by afternoon in patches that follow the sandiest ground. A soil assay confirms what the map suspects.

Mole crickets

Neoscapteriscus tunnels raise the collar and the rough into soft ridges and the turf over them dries out. The egret walks the edge for them, as it does for the frogs in the shallows.

Fall armyworms

Spodoptera larvae eat across the rough in a front: green ahead of it, chewed brown behind, a yard a night. Birds gather on the line. The green is mown too close to feed them.

Algae

Where the turf thinned by the pond a black crust of cyanobacteria seals the surface, slick when wet and cracked when dry, and the pond itself greens with the runoff's nitrogen.

Salt stress

The irrigation is reclaimed water, and its salts collect where the heads throw it. The green dulls blue-gray, the leaf tips bronze and die back, and the turf grows slow until a rain leaches it.

Water stress

The dry season and a pump down for a week. The rough browns first, then the collar; the green wilts blue-gray on the sand and the pond drops a hand's width, the mud baring at its edge.

Aeration and
topdressing

Cores pulled from the green on a two-inch grid and sand dragged into the holes: for a week the green reads as sand with turf under it. The rough is left alone.

Recovery

The heads run again at night, the sand disappears under new growth and the green closes over its holes. What was dry, salted or eaten comes back where the roots survived, and not where they did not.

Dormancy

The first nights under fifty degrees and bermudagrass shuts down: the rough goes straw across the whole map, the collar after it, the cattails brown along the water.

Overseeded green

Perennial ryegrass sown into the dormant green and up in a week: an emerald surface for winter play on a course that has gone tan, the one green thing the camera can see.

Change detected

One green, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last week's, and act on before a golfer notices.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a pumpkin leaf changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole patch.

Hill sown

One Atlantic Giant pumpkin seed, started indoors in a peat pot and set out in a warmed hill at the back once the frost is past, sunflower seed along the border. The scarecrow stood here all winter.

Emergence

The seedling hooks up and pulls two thick seed leaves out of the hill; the sunflowers are up beside the post. A survey now is a stand count: one plant, and whether it came.

First true leaf

The first true leaf opens between the seed leaves, rounded and rough, the second behind it. The plant sits on its hill a few weeks yet while the roots go down and out.

Vine runs

The main vine turns and runs, a foot a day at its best, a leaf at every node on a stalk half a meter tall. It roots at each node where it is buried, and the sunflowers are knee high.

Canopy closes

Secondaries every node off the main vine, pruned into a fishbone, the tertiaries pinched. Leaves two feet across shade the dirt out; the red edge now separates a fed plant from a merely big one.

Male flowers

The first flowers are male: orange trumpets on tall stalks, each open one morning and shut by noon, a week before any female flower. The sunflower buds show. Yellow against green is a visible-band job.

Pollination

A female flower opens on the main vine, a small fruit behind it, and is hand pollinated at dawn with three fresh male flowers and bagged. The sunflowers open with it; bees work both.

Fruit set

The fruit swells to a soccer ball in ten days and the grower keeps it; later fruit on the secondaries stay small. The vine is trained to run square to the fruit, so growing does not pull its stem.

Bulking

Thirty to forty pounds a day at the peak, most of it water: a giant pumpkin at this stage takes a hundred gallons a week and drops the whole patch's water status onto a map.

Nitrogen shortfall

The feed was cut back too far as the fruit came on: the older leaves down the main vine pale evenly, whole leaves rather than veins, nitrogen leaving them for the fruit. The sunflowers show nothing.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per leaf slips a few percent more and the steep rise near 700 nm slides toward the blue. A multispectral camera reads it days before a grower sees a color.

Potassium shortfall

A giant pumpkin moves more potassium into its fruit than any other crop, and the older leaves pay: margins yellow, then scorch tan where the veins end. The fruit fills slower than the grower expects.

Cucumber beetles
and bacterial wilt

Striped beetles chew holes across the patch and carry Erwinia in their gut. One secondary wilts in the afternoon, recovers overnight, then stays down: the sap runs stringy and the runner dies.

Squash bugs

Gray nymphs in clusters on the undersides of one runner's leaves, sucking sap: yellow stipple first, then the blade between the veins browns and goes brittle. They shelter under the big leaves by day.

Squash vine borer

A moth laid on the stem base in June; the grub is inside now, and the runner past it wilts with a heap of orange frass at the hole. Buried nodes root past the damage on the main vine, not on this one.

Powdery mildew

Podosphaera, the one that comes every year once the canopy is dense: white colonies on the older leaves first, spreading until whole blades are gray-white and the fruit loses the leaf area that fills it.

Downy mildew

Pseudoperonospora, blown up from the south in late summer: pale angular patches bounded by the veins, a gray-purple down under them in the morning wet, browning within days.

Phytophthora
fruit rot

Two days of standing water and Phytophthora takes a secondary's fruit where it sits on the soil: a water-soaked patch, then a white yeast-like growth over it. The giant pumpkin is on its sand, and dry.

Mosaic virus

Aphids brought a potyvirus in: the young leaves at the vine tips come out mottled light and dark, puckered and small. Too late in the season to hurt the giant pumpkin; the late-set fruit warp.

Water stress

A week of heat and the leaves wilt flat every afternoon, standing again by morning. The fruit's growth stalls, and a rain now would split it. The camera reads the water before the wilt.

Skin sets

The orange deepens and hardens, the vine yellows from the hill out and lies down. The sunflower heads bow, their backs yellow, the rays gone. The season's pigments show before the greenness does.

Crows and mice

The crow takes the scarecrow's arm for the sunflower seed; field mice gnaw the giant pumpkin's rind low down, where it meets the ground, the way voles and squirrels open a ripe fruit for its seeds.

Harvest

The giant pumpkin is cut from the vine with a length of stem, rolled onto a tarp and lifted with a tripod for the weigh-off. The vines are pulled; the late fruit stay for the mice.

Change detected

One patch, one plant, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last season, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a coffee tree changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole farm.

Bare wood

Pruned trees before the rains, tiers of horizontal branches and not much else. Ground, shade trees and wood are most of what the camera sees.

Leaf flush

New leaves push at every node, bronze at first and then green. Flush timing is the clearest early signal of how the season is going to go.

Canopy builds

Tiers fill out and the tree closes its own shade. Nitrogen demand climbs, and a fertilizer decision here still changes this year's crop.

Flowering

The rains trigger white flowers all along the wood, all at once. Everything about this year's crop is decided in about a week.

Cherries set

Green cherries form in clusters along the branch. Fruit and leaf now compete for the same nitrogen, and the fruit usually wins.

Canopy closes

Rows meet and NDVI saturates under shade trees that were already saturating it. Red edge is the only thing still resolving differences.

Nitrogen shortfall

Cherry fill pulls nitrogen from the oldest leaves. Red edge separates a feeding problem from a water problem while a top dressing still helps.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per unit leaf falls and the red edge inflection slides toward the blue. Its position is a measurement, not an impression.

Cherries ripen

Green turns yellow turns red as sugar builds in the mucilage. Ripeness is a color measurement before it is a picking decision.

Leaf rust appears

The first orange pustules on the undersides of the lowest leaves. Green ratios separate infected trees from healthy ones before a scout would call the block.

Coffee berry disease

Sunken dark lesions on green cherries, worst in wet high-altitude blocks. The loss is in the fruit, and the map is of where the weather sat.

Coffee berry borer

A beetle in the cherry, invisible from outside. What the map can give you is the shaded, humid, unpicked corners where it builds up.

Harvest

Pickers take the ripe cherries off a tree that still has most of its leaves. Ripeness maps tell you which blocks to send them to first.

Rust spreads

Pustules multiply and the tissue around them yellows. Pigment ratios move well before whole-canopy greenness does.

Rust defoliates

Infected leaves drop, and a tree that drops its leaves cannot fill its cherries. Now it is a canopy-area problem as well as a pigment one.

Cercospora

Brown eye spot on leaf and cherry, worst where trees are hungry and exposed. It tracks nutrition, so the nutrition map and the disease map overlap.

Heat and sun

Shade thins, leaf temperature climbs, and the tree closes stomata by mid-morning. Photochemical reflectance moves within hours of the stress.

Water stress

Leaf water content drops and the near-infrared water bands separate. Blocks on thin soil stop looking like blocks on deep soil.

Dieback

Overbearing plus stress kills back the fruiting wood. A branch that dies this year is a branch that carries nothing next year.

Leaf area lost

Rust, dieback and picking together open the canopy. Ground and shade come back into the pixels, and soil-adjusted indices hold their meaning.

Canopy thins

What is left is wood and a thin scatter of leaf. A tree that goes into the dry season like this will not flower well.

Senescence

Chlorophyll breaks down and carotenoid is all that is left in the remaining leaf. The senescence ratios were built for this transition.

Bare wood again

Back to the skeleton it started as, a year of cherries later. A survey now maps every trunk and every gap before the next flush hides them.

Change detected

One farm, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands an oil palm changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole estate.

A palm in production

A mature stand, one palm to look at. Ground cover between the trunks is most of what the camera sees, so the crown and the cover have to be separated first.

New fronds open

The spear pushes and another frond opens on a schedule you can set a calendar by. A palm that falls behind that schedule is telling you something.

Crown builds

The crown fills out and starts to shade its own ground. Nutrient demand climbs with frond number, and this is where a fertilizer map earns its keep.

First bunches

Inflorescences set in the leaf axils. Bunch number per palm is the yield, and it is decided by crown condition two years before it is harvested.

Bunches swell

Fruit fills and the bunch weight climbs. The palm is now feeding a crown and a crop at the same time, from the same roots.

Canopy closes

Fronds from neighboring palms overlap and the ground disappears. NDVI hits its ceiling across the whole block at once.

Potassium shortfall

Confluent orange spotting on the older fronds, the classic oil palm deficiency. Pigment ratios read it while the crown still counts as green.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per unit frond falls and the red edge inflection slides. Its position trends cleanly on a palm-by-palm basis.

Fruit ripens

Bunches turn from green through orange to red as oil lays down in the mesocarp. Ripeness is a color measurement before it is a mill measurement.

Nitrogen shortfall

Whole-frond paling starting with the oldest. Red edge separates a nutrition problem from a water problem where broadband red cannot.

Harvest round

Ripe bunches are cut and the round comes back in ten days. The crown stays on the palm, so a yield map here is a crown map from a fortnight ago.

Basal stem rot

Ganoderma works up from the base inside the trunk, and the palm pushes new roots out above the rot. Years before a crown collapses, its water transport is already compromised.

Ganoderma spreads

Infected palms cluster, because the fungus moves through root contact. The pattern on the map is the diagnosis.

Crown thins

Frond count drops and the crown opens. Ground comes back into pixels that had been pure canopy for years.

Bud rot

The spear fails and the newest fronds die from the center out. Once the growing point is gone the palm will not recover.

Leaf spot

Curvularia and its relatives scatter lesions across the younger fronds, worst in nurseries and young plantings.

Drought sets in

A long dry spell closes stomata and aborts inflorescences. The yield effect arrives two years later; the reflectance effect arrives this week.

Water stress deepens

Frond water content drops and the near-infrared water bands separate. Low-lying blocks and ridges stop looking alike.

Bunches abort

The palm sheds what it cannot carry. Bunch count per palm falls, and the crown that was going to fill next year's bunches is not there.

Fronds collapse

Older fronds skirt and hang against the trunk. Less frond pointed at the sky is a geometry change as well as a biology one.

Canopy opens

Gaps appear in a block that used to be closed. Ground cover and bare soil come back into the pixels and soil-adjusted indices hold their meaning.

Senescence

Chlorophyll breaks down across the remaining crown and carotenoid is what is left. The senescence ratios were built for this transition.

Standing dead

Bare trunk, dead fronds, no bunches. A palm reaches this in years, and every one of those years had a number on it that a camera could have read.

Change detected

One block, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.

Before you
can see it.

LATTICE cameras record the exact bands a banana plant changes in, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Pick the filter that answers your question, then read it back as an index across the whole plantation.

Sucker planted

A sword sucker set in its hole in the row: a corm, a few narrow leaves, and the one pseudostem it will ever raise. A survey of a new block counts plants and gaps while the ground is still mostly soil.

Leaves unfurl

A new leaf unrolls from the crown every seven to ten days, a cigar that opens and tears along its veins in the first wind. Leaf emergence is the growth rate, and to the camera it is canopy area.

Pseudostem builds

The trunk is no trunk: rolled leaf sheaths, each new one pushed up inside the last, thickening as the plant grows. Vigor now is bunch weight later.

Canopy closes

The plant carries ten or twelve leaves at once and the rows meet overhead. Near-infrared saturates on a canopy this dense, which is where broadband indices stop separating one plant from the next.

Flag leaf

The last leaf comes up small: the flag leaf, with the bunch a week behind it. Red edge keeps counting where NIR has run out of room.

Shooting

The inflorescence pushes out of the top of the pseudostem, a purple bud on a stalk that arches over under its own weight. Growers date the plant from this day.

Hands set

The bracts lift and fall one by one, each uncovering a double row of female flowers that are already the fingers of a hand. Nine hands set in a fortnight, and that is the whole crop.

The bell

Past the last hand the rachis goes on into the bell, neutral then male flowers under its purple scales. Plantations break it off once the hands are set: what the plant spends on it now is grade at harvest.

Fingers fill

The fingers straighten and swell for eleven or twelve weeks from the day they showed. Everything the canopy makes now goes into the bunch, so a leaf lost is fruit lost.

Nitrogen shortfall

Leaves of every age pale, new ones come slower and smaller, and the petioles and midribs pick up a pink flush. Red edge separates a feeding problem from a water one while a top-up still fills the bunch.

Potassium shortfall

A banana takes up more potassium than any other crop. The oldest leaves yellow orange from the tip back between the veins and die early. Bunch weight goes with it.

Red edge shifts

Chlorophyll per leaf falls and the red edge inflection slides toward the blue. Its position is a measurement, not an impression.

Black Sigatoka

Pseudocercospora starts as faint reddish streaks on the underside of the young leaves, then dark streaks on top. Spray timing is set by the youngest leaf with a streak, and the map finds the blocks.

Sigatoka spreads

Streaks widen into black spindles with yellow halos and run together; the old leaves die from the margin in. A plant kept above eight leaves fills its bunch, one below does not.

Bunchy top

The banana aphid brings the virus: dark green dot-and-dash streaks along the veins, then leaves that come up narrow, short and bunched upright. Infected early, a plant never bunches at all.

Color break

The top hand turns first: green goes yellow hand by hand down the bunch as the starch converts. Left on the plant to color, a bunch is what every monkey in the valley has been waiting for.

Cigar-end rot

The withered flower on a finger's tip is the way in: Trachysphaera rots the tip back, dry and black, under an ash-grey coat of mold that looks like the end of a cigar. The map is of where the bunches stayed wet.

Anthracnose and speckle

Colletotrichum puts sunken black spots with salmon hearts on the ripening peel, and Deightoniella its fine speckle toward the tips. The loss is in the fruit; the map is of the humid corners of the block.

Fusarium wilt

Tropical Race 4 comes up through the roots into the vascular tissue, and the plant cannot move its own water. The oldest leaves yellow from the margin, then collapse at the petiole and hang.

Wilt spreads

The pseudostem splits at its base, leaf after leaf goes over, and the bunch ripens early and unevenly on a plant that cannot fill it. The fungus travels in soil, so the map is a quarantine line.

Leaf area lost

What green is left folds down along the midrib and greys: roots this far gone cannot lift water however wet the ground is. The water bands separated days before the fold showed.

Salvage harvest

The bunch comes off early and light, worth a fraction of a clean one, and the pseudostem is felled and chopped where it stood. A map says which blocks are worth a crew.

Ground cleared

Stump, mulch and bare dirt, and no replanting here for years. One cleared plant is a pixel; a line of them is the way the disease walked into the block.

Change detected

One plant, one bunch, one season, twenty-four measurements. Every one of them is a number you can put on a map, compare to last year, and act on.