What does it actually take to map every agricultural field on Earth?
In this episode, Matt sits down with Jen Marcus, Vice President of Strategic Innovation Programs at Taylor Geospatial, and Isaac Corley, Director of AI/ML Research at Taylor Geospatial and a torchgeo maintainer, the team behind Fields of The World (FTW).
In late April they released the first globally consistent dataset of agricultural field boundaries, at 10m resolution, fully open on Source Cooperative. They dive deep into how it came together, from building the fiboa format to standardize ground truth across 24 countries, to running model inference across the entire planet, to shipping it with a confidence layer instead of pretending it was perfect. You'll hear honest perspective on what GeoAI can really do today and where the hype outpaces reality.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why a global field boundary map had never been done, and why no single organization was positioned to do it
- The labeled-data problem and why models have to generalize to places like South America and Africa with little ground truth
- The fiboa format and Chris Holmes's "architectures of participation"
- How the Technical Fellows program turned open-source contributors into the core team
- Running global inference efficiently with Sentinel-2 planting and harvest mosaics
- Cloud-native outputs (GeoParquet, PMTiles, Zarr) you can stream with no backend
- What's real vs. what's marketing in geospatial AI, and the ImageNet lesson
- What's next: stakeholder feedback loops, higher-resolution imagery, and mapping new features beyond fields
Whether you build ML pipelines, work with satellite data, or you've ever wondered how much of the planet is still genuinely unmapped, this conversation breaks it down without the buzzwords.
LINKS:
Fields of The World:
https://fieldsofthe.worldDataset on Source Cooperative:
https://source.coop/wherobots/fields-of-the-worldTaylor Geospatial:
https://taylorgeospatial.orgJen Marcus
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-marcus-b559091/Isaac Corley
Website:
https://isaac.earthLinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaaccorley/GitHub:
https://github.com/isaaccorley📊 FREE: The Modern GIS Skill Map
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00:00:00 – Cold Open
00:01:01 – Welcome and Guest Intros (Jen Marcus and Isaac Corley)
00:02:32 – Why Map Field Boundaries, and Why It Had Never Been Done
00:05:53 – Going from Local to Global Scale
00:07:19 – Architectures of Participation and the fiboa Format
00:12:44 – The First St. Louis Meeting and the Technical Fellows Program
00:18:04 – Running Global Inference at Scale
00:22:54 – Cloud-Native Outputs on Source Cooperative
00:25:05 – Why This Matters and What's Real vs. Hype
00:28:39 – The ImageNet Lesson and Holding a North Star
00:32:20 – What's Next for Fields of The World
00:36:12 – Impact, an OpenStreetMap for Fields, and How to Get Involved
00:40:33 – Postdoc, Tech Fellows, and Looking Out the Airplane Window
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