6thGrain signs contract with Rwanda Space Agency (RSA) to deploy Remote Sensing Engine &ML Stack to deliver national agriculture and forestry intelligence

6th Grain (6G) has begun a six-month project to deploy its operational Remote Sensing Engine and machine-learning models to create satellite remote sensing-based decision-ready intelligence for Rwanda. The stack ingests Sentinel satellite images, applies radiometric/geometric correction, cloud removal, and temporal reconstruction, then delivers production & yield, field boundaries, land-use layers, crop-type distribution, and forest-carbon analytics. Outputs will post to an Executive Dashboard and web data terminal integrated with GeoHub—bringing an operational Earth-observation capability into the national platform for the first time in this program’s lifecycle.

GeoHub and Governance
GeoHub is Rwanda’s centralized geospatial infrastructure, operated by the Rwanda Space Agency (RSA) with co-leadership from the Ministry of ICT and Innovation(MINICT) to support evidence-based planning, food security assessment, and public-service delivery. 6G’s systems will run on RSA infrastructure and are designed for handover and sustained government operation.

6G’s systems will provide Rwanda’s GeoHub:

●       Country-scale production & yield by crop/season for economic planning, budget phasing,and market readiness.

●       National arable vs. non-arable and cultivated vs. non-cultivated layers.

●       Field-boundary maps that resolve one-acre smallholder plots, supporting acreage accounting, compliance checks, and district targeting.

●       Crop-typemaps (initially maize, wheat, rice) for input allocation and storage.

●       Disease-pressure risk to prioritize extension agents’ priorities and early-action budgets.

●       Dashboards/terminal for fast, cross-agency use (planning, finance, agriculture, environment).

The Forestry application will support the Rwanda Forestry Authority’s use of GeoHub services, and will provide forest area & change,tree height/growth, species and trees per hectare, and carbon sequestration metrics (including tons and value) to strengthen national inventory and climatereporting alongside agriculture outputs.

Method,quality, and ownership
On RSA infrastructure, the pipeline uses time series remote sensing to monitor vegetation signals under cloud, and applies supervised/object-based mapping. Ground sampling, field protocols, and reference datasets calibrate models and validate outputs nationally. Training and capacity building events will enable RSA and sector agencies to operate and extend the system post-deployment. The approach is structured to be replicable where similar government platforms require an operational EO capability.

Media contact
Molly Brown, Chief Science Officer - mbrown@6grain.com, 703-855-6190

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