Looking to space, starting with Lebanon’s fields

When I think about technological development in Lebanon, I often notice the distance between what is technically possible and what is actually available to ordinary people.

Agriculture is one of the areas where that gap interests me most because farmers are working with land, weather, crops, water, and constantly changing environmental conditions, while at the same time enormous amounts of information about the Earth are being collected from satellites.

I want to explore whether more of that information can reach the field in a useful form.

That does not mean overwhelming somebody with satellite imagery or complicated technical measurements. What matters is whether the information can help somebody notice a change, understand a pattern, decide where to inspect something more closely, or make a better-informed decision.

When useful technology exists but remains inaccessible, the farmer does not benefit from the fact that the technology technically exists somewhere else.

That is basically where CedarField began. If satellites can observe agricultural land from space, I want to explore whether some of that information can be turned into something useful for somebody managing a field in Lebanon, including people who would rather use the service in Arabic than English.

Satellite technology obviously makes CedarField sound futuristic, but for me the interesting part begins after the satellite has already collected the information.

A satellite reading on its own is not automatically useful. Somebody still needs to understand what it means, how reliable it is, how it relates to what is happening on the ground, and whether it answers a question that actually matters to them.

That is the part of CedarField I care about most.

I am not under the illusion that an agricultural dashboard is going to solve the larger problems facing Lebanese agriculture. Farmers deal with costs, infrastructure, access to financing, water, political instability, imports, markets, and many other problems that software cannot simply remove.

At the same time, I do not think every major structural problem needs to disappear before somebody can try to build one useful tool.

CedarField is my attempt to explore whether satellite data and other agricultural information can be made easier to understand and more accessible to people who could actually use it.

The technology may begin in space, but the goal is much closer to the ground.