The Ag Spy: How Lanny Faleide Mapped the Future of Farming From Space

In central North Dakota, where the horizon rolls out like a blanket of possibility, Lanny Faleide was never just watching the skies—he was reading them. Long before “ag tech” became a buzzword or satellite imagery became a staple in precision agriculture, Faleide was already fusing his love of flying with his intuition for the land, unknowingly laying the groundwork for a technology revolution. His path wasn’t scripted in Silicon Valley boardrooms or venture-backed accelerator halls. It began in a tractor, in a cockpit, and eventually, in the quiet conviction that there had to be a better way to understand the soil beneath our feet.

In the 1980s, farming was unraveling. Interest rates climbed to 21%, land values plummeted, and the American Midwest felt like a region in retreat. Faleide, a farmer and licensed pilot, had already logged countless hours in the air—surveying his own fields and noting patterns in the way crops grew, struggled, or failed.

“Even in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said, “I was taking pictures of my fields and noticing differences. That’s when I realized the potential of satellite imagery.” But seeing potential and realizing it are two very different things.

He and his wife made the difficult decision to leave the farm, return to school, and rebuild their lives from scratch. It was a painful but calculated risk—a pivot not away from agriculture, but toward its future.

That choice was the first of many that would define his next three decades. He went on to found a company focused on extracting and interpreting satellite-derived biomass signatures—imagery that could reveal with striking precision which parts of a field were productive and which were failing. His early clients weren’t venture firms or multinational agribusinesses, but regional players like American Crystal Sugar.

“That first contract was for $92,000,” he said. “And it changed everything.”

The Birth Of An Ag Spy

Lanny Faleide refers to himself as an “ag spy,” a term that, at first sounds whimsical—maybe even self-deprecating. But that nickname reflects a career spent peering into the secrets of the earth, using satellite eyes to track, analyze, and decode the silent messages of farmland across continents.

That first job with American Crystal Sugar blossomed into nearly two decades of consulting work, covering over 500,000 acres of sugar beets across the U.S. and Canada. During that time, Faleide refined a datadriven system capable of rendering an intimate portrait of crop health at scale, helping growers make better decisions while preserving resources.

Along the way, he resisted the path many ag-tech companies followed—building sprawling teams of agronomists, launching consulting arms, and expanding for expansion’s sake. Instead, he envisioned a lean, SaaS-based model where farmers or their advisors could subscribe to his platform, map their fields, and extract insights on their own. This DIY approach kept overhead low, empowered users, and established a scalable model well before “agile” and “cloud-native” became industry norms.