I've taken a few GIS classes, and there are some cool things you can do with satellite imagery. You can use remote sensing to check up on crop health and growth. I did a small school project why I estimated the percentage of trees killed by pine beetles.

I'd do some research into QGIS, remote sensing, and NDVI if you are interested. You would want multi-spectral imagery from a satellite with Near Infrared sensors, and RapidEye has them.

That said, this is technical. It might be easier if you were comfortable enough with coding to get the imagery from their developer API. And GIS/remote sensing analysis is somewhat complicated. Plus, remote sensing doesn't analyze anything really, it just filters information. So you would have to be comfortable with the farm, the theory behind remote sensing, and the process in order to correctly interpret the data. I'm not familiar enough with agriculture to get really specific information from satellite imagery. So you might be putting a decent amount of work into get info you could just have gotten by walking out into your field.

Edit: there's a lot more uses like mattzero mentioned if you are using it for more than just farming. For instance, if you hunt or fish you can use satellite imagery to determine where specific ecosystems begin and end. So there is a lot you can do.

I did a small write-up on how open satellite data can be processed with open source tools to build crop health maps without relying in commercial software/companies: https://wechoosethemoon.es/2015/10/08/landsat-ndvi-leaflet/

Nice writeup! However I have a honest question, why did you mess up with scrolling?

Honest answer, I just liked it at the time. Is it better now?

That's a good question! what kind of things do you want to be able to do with data? If you're a farmer, maybe this kind of data could help you understand which of your fields are stressed from lack of water, or which varietal of corn performs best during an uncommonly warm or cold growing season. If you're a wanderer than maybe you could quickly survey an entire national park to find yourself a nice open field that's far away from any roads and make that your next camping destination. The time slider is cool too--if you want to go see fire damage close up you could probably find patches that only burned recently. Or apply the same idea to a patch that burned down a few years ago, and check in on its recovery.

Actually that sound like a sweet project. You could go out and take pictures of a freshly burned fire, one that's 1 year old, one that's 2 years old, etc.

I don't think you need to be a coder to use timely data.

I spent twenty years as a fertilizer company agronomist. I first worked with aerial infrared crop photos in 1983. The industry has been slow to launch and been limited to high priced crops because of cost.

If fertilizer companies and ag consultants could piggy back on top of the state's purchase of imagery it could be a game changer. If all the states would do this you'd see an entire industry grow up using it.

I'd also be happy to set you up with a free account on www.farmshots.com. It's a neat project for processing/analyzing satellite imagery of farms.