CropMap / Cases / Soybean growers in Kazakhstan

Seed & input sales · Kazakhstan

YES!AGRO: finding soybean growers in Kazakhstan, field by field

Anton Shilenko, head of YES!AGRO, came to us with a simple question: which farms in Kazakhstan actually grow soybean? We mapped 4,232 soybean fields across six regions and turned them into a live map of districts and growing clusters that his sales team can work from.

October 15, 2026 · Reading time · 5 minutes

Large soybean fields highlighted in green over satellite imagery in Kostanay Region, Kazakhstan; lakes inside the fields are left out

79.9 k ha

soybean mapped

4,232

soybean fields

114

clusters ≥ 100 ha

regions

Client

Anton Shilenko

Head of YES!AGRO · soybean seed, Kazakhstan

@yes.agro.kz

The question

YES!AGRO sells soybean seed in Kazakhstan. Soybean is a niche crop there: about 0.1 million hectares in a country with more than 20 million hectares of cropland. The growers are hard to find.

Statistics stop at the region. Official figures say how much soybean each region grows, not which farms or fields grow it.
There is no short list to call. In Jetisu, the largest soybean region, more than 90% of the soybean area is grown outside large agricultural enterprises, on peasant and family farms.
In the north it is a minor crop. In Kostanay, Akmola and East Kazakhstan, soybean fields sit among millions of hectares of wheat and oilseeds.

The ask was to show where the soybean fields are, so the sales team could plan visits district by district instead of calling around.

What we did

Start from fields

We start from our own field boundaries for Kazakhstan: 3.1 million fields mapped from satellite imagery.

Recognise the crop

Our models identify the crop on every field from satellite imagery over the whole season.

Check every field

Each field passes automated quality checks. Anything doubtful is dropped, not guessed.

Checked against data

Results are checked against our own dataset of fields with known crops and against official statistics. Regional totals never exceed the reported soybean area.

Whole fields, not pixels

Soybean is shown as whole fields, the unit a sales rep actually visits, with the area and district of each one.

Soybean fields highlighted in green around Aldabergenov, Koksu District, Jetisu Region — Koksu District, Jetisu Region: soybean fields around Aldabergenov. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.

Two very different markets

Once the fields were on the map, the soybean market in Kazakhstan split into two clear parts.

Region	On the map, k ha	Official, k ha	Fields	Avg field, ha
Jetisu	58.6	68.4	3,555	16
Kostanay	8.9	10.2	81	110
Almaty	8.5	14.2	506	17
East Kazakhstan	1.4	1.3	28	48
Akmola	1.3	1.2	13	98
Abai	1.2	1.2	49	25
Total	79.9	96.5	4,232	19

Official: harvested soybean area reported by Kazakhstan's Bureau of National Statistics.

The south-east is a territory of many small fields. Jetisu and Almaty have more than 4,000 soybean fields averaging 16–17 ha, packed into irrigated valleys. Five districts (Panfilov, Sarkand, Alakol, Eskeldi and Koksu) hold 49 thousand hectares, 62% of all soybean on the map. That is work for a field team going village by village.
The north has few, large fields. In Kostanay, 81 fields average 110 ha. One farm visit there can cover hundreds of hectares.

We grouped neighbouring fields into growing clusters: 689 in total, 114 of them larger than 100 ha. Each cluster comes with its district and centre point, ready to be turned into a route.

How we checked it

On a farm with full crop records. A partner farm in East Kazakhstan shared crop records for 330 fields. Its soybean field was 96% covered by the map. None of its 329 fields with other crops was marked as soybean.
Against official totals. Across the six regions, the map accounts for 83% of the officially reported soybean area. The rest is on fields our checks could not confirm, and we did not fill the gap with guesses.

What we left out

In North Kazakhstan, the map did not pass our check against soybean fields we already knew about. We kept that region off the map until we have local ground truth. A sales map is only useful if a rep can trust every field on it.

What YES!AGRO gets

A live map with every soybean field, its area and its district, which works on a phone in the field: map.cropmap.ai.
Totals by region and district and a ranked list of the largest growing clusters.
A field list as GeoJSON, GeoPackage or CSV, with area, district, cluster and centre coordinates for each field.

The live soybean map of Kazakhstan with totals by region and the largest clusters — The live map: totals by region and the largest soybean clusters, with every field one click away.

What comes next

Every field the sales team visits and confirms feeds back into the map. Confirmed soybean fields make it sharper and will let North Kazakhstan join it.

The same approach works for any crop that statistics only report by region:

Seed and crop-protection companies: find the growers and size each sales territory.
Processors and traders: see where a crop is grown around a plant or an elevator.
Lenders and insurers: check what is actually growing on a declared field.

Looking for growers of a specific crop?

Tell us the crop and the region. We'll send a free sample of field-level data.

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