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Email Przemysław Żelazowski
Founding SatAgro and making satellite-based precision agriculture accessible to farms of any size
How a satellite scientist who mapped tropical forests from Oxford redirected that same expertise to help farmers across Poland and North America make smarter field decisions.
Przemysław Żelazowski spent the first decade of his career using satellites to map tropical forest extent from Oxford. The second decade he spent helping Polish farmers decide when to fertilize, when to seed, and when to spray, working from the same satellite data sources. His arc is less a story about agriculture than about what one person can do with deep expertise in an observational system once that system gets cheap enough to reach individual farms.
How he innovates
Żelazowski co-founded SatAgro in 2013 to apply Copernicus Sentinel imagery alongside NASA and Planet PlanetScope feeds to crop monitoring and precision agriculture. The platform produces near-real-time vegetation indices, plus variable-rate prescription maps that cover fertilization as well as seeding and spraying decisions. Those outputs feed straight into equipment such as John Deere variable-rate controllers.
What defines the approach in practice:
- Deep value-chain dialogue before product design. “Understanding what they have been doing with the farms for decades allows you to map where you can help and where you cannot,” Żelazowski has said about working alongside cooperatives, agrochemical companies, and food processors at every link in the chain. The platform was shaped by that dialogue, not by technology-push alone.
- Resilience as the design goal, not maximum yield. His stated priority is “helping the farm to survive from season to season,” because “quite often, it’s not the highest yields that are linked to the biggest profits.” That reframing of success, from optimization to survival, shapes how the platform communicates value to farmers.
- Near-zero marginal cost per hectare. Satellite data is acquired once and then applied across any number of fields. Unit economics improve as coverage grows. A free tier for farms under 50 hectares is rational market entry, not a concession.
- Machine learning for depth beyond the index. An ESA-funded project (ACCESS-4FI, 2021) advanced SatAgro’s capability from NDVI visualization into automated crop classification and yield prediction in partnership with the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
What guides him
Quiet skepticism. That is what Żelazowski brings to the innovation-for-growth assumptions that dominate agritech. When he launched commercially in 2015, the reaction from business contacts was dismissive: “When I talked to business owners in 2015 and showed them the prototype, I came across as a loony from outer space.” He did not pivot toward easier customers. He deepened the dialogue instead, looking for the spots where satellite data added measurable value to an agricultural business.
A decade consulting for the FAO/UN on satellite monitoring and REDD+ forest deforestation reporting taught him exactly what earth observation can and cannot do. That negative capability, knowing the limits of the data, is what separates SatAgro’s positioning from vague platform promises.
What makes him effective
Żelazowski pairs a DPhil from Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute with a founder’s tolerance for slow-moving markets. He watched plenty of academic-to-startup transitions fail because the founder overestimated how fast a conservative industry would adopt new tools. He chose a different path. He built via public partnerships, including ESA, FAO, EU Regional Development Fund programmes, and Poland’s Agriculture 4.0 subsidy scheme, and SatAgro had a validated, funded decade behind it before the American Crystal Sugar deal of October 2024 marked entry into the North American market. What he actually built over that decade was systems thinking at the level of the entire agricultural value chain, not the individual field.
What you can borrow
- Redirect deep expertise to adjacent problems. What Żelazowski sold was not satellite technology in the abstract. It was the ability to translate satellite signals into specific agricultural decisions. Identify what translation your expertise enables.
- Choose survival as your product’s success criterion. If your clients face seasonal existential pressure, a product that improves consistency across bad seasons often beats one that promises to maximize outcomes in the good ones.
- Use public funding as a credibility bridge. ESA, FAO, and EU structural funds are more than money. In conservative industries, they are signals to commercial buyers that the technology has been independently validated.
- A free tier in a conservative market is an education tool, not a discount. Żelazowski offered satellite monitoring at no cost for farms under 50 hectares to reduce the unfamiliarity barrier that blocked adoption by smaller operators.
Incidental facts
- DPhil (2006 to 2010), Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. Thesis: “Contemporary and future extent of evergreen tropical forests: insights from remote sensing and climate change simulations.” Supervisor: Professor Yadvinder Malhi.
- Co-founded SatAgro in June 2013 (Warsaw, Poland). Commercial launch approximately 2015.
- Approximately 250,000 hectares of farmland monitored in Poland alone, as of approximately 2020.
- SatAgro signed a contract with American Crystal Sugar Company (largest beet-sugar cooperative in the United States) in October 2024 for near-daily satellite monitoring of sugar beet harvest and yield across the Red River Valley (North Dakota and Minnesota).
- Academic publication record: over 1,294 citations (Web of Science), H-index 9. Lab Team Leader at the Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw, from August 2015.