GPS on a Kampong Thom paddy

How we monitor AWD and No Burn compliance for BRM farmers without turning them into a spreadsheet.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-04-18 · Ventures

A Sentinel-2 satellite passes over Kampong Thom every five days and photographs the BRM Agro paddy at ten metre resolution.

Two things in that picture matter to our buyers and our investors. We can see whether a field was burned after harvest. And through NDVI we can see whether a farmer is keeping the field as wet as he says, or letting it dry between irrigation cycles. That drying cycle is called Alternate Wetting and Drying. It cuts methane and saves water, and it is one of the practices we ask farmers to follow.

The instance is called BRM Cambodia Basemap and it runs on Sentinel Hub. We pull NDVI and burn scar layers for every field we monitor. On a slide this looks immaculate. On the ground it is considerably messier.

One farmer, our best performing last season, does not need a satellite to tell him his paddy is drying out. He has been reading those fields for thirty years and he can do it from the gate. The satellite tells the office, the buyer and the auditor what he already knew on Monday.

The technology proves compliance to a French buyer or a German co-financing programme. It improves our account of his farming and leaves his farming as it was. Those two things overlap more often than cynics assume and less often than the deck implies.

Year one, we build the system and learn to read what it tells us. Year two, we use the data to support farmers instead of policing them, which is harder than it sounds when the data makes policing so convenient. Year three, farmers see their own fields on a screen and start asking questions about water and soil that we do not yet know how to answer. That is the year the satellite becomes useful to the paddy rather than to the office.

We are in year one.