Crop Health Analysis and Oil & Gas Mineral Management Guide

Reviewed August 2026 against USDA’s NASS Crop Progress reports, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s well-count data, and the Department of the Interior’s federal mineral-revenue reporting.

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Crop health analysis is the practice of reading multispectral or radar satellite imagery for signs of plant stress — moisture deficit, nutrient shortage, pest pressure — before those signs are visible from the ground, then checking that signal against USDA’s own weekly crop condition ratings. Oil and gas mineral management is a separate discipline entirely: tracking who owns the minerals under a given acre, what a lease and division order actually pay, and how that changes as wells are drilled, sold, or shut in. Both come down to the same question — what is this land actually doing right now, not what a summary says it’s probably doing — and this guide gives you the current numbers, the sources behind them, and the tools to check them yourself.

Crop Health Analysis: What It Measures and How Reliable It Is

Crop health analysis works by comparing reflected light across satellite bands — usually red, near-infrared, and sometimes short-wave infrared — into indices like NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) that track chlorophyll density and canopy vigor. A drop in that index shows up while a plant is still rerouting resources to cope with stress, which is why the method catches trouble before a windshield survey does. It doesn’t replace ground data; it works alongside it.

The benchmark for “ground truth” in the United States is USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) weekly Crop Progress and Condition report, published every Monday during the growing season and covering the major commodity in each reporting state. For the week ending August 2, 2026, NASS rated national corn condition at 61% good-to-excellent, down two points from 63% the week before — but that single national number hides a wide state-level spread: Iowa corn was rated 80% good-to-excellent the same week, while Kansas corn came in at 46%. A satellite feed showing field-level NDVI trends is what lets an operator or agronomist find out which side of that spread their own acres fall on, days before the next NASS release, rather than waiting for a county-level average to catch up.

Adoption of the technology that generates this kind of field-level signal is uneven across U.S. agriculture, and it tracks operation size closely. USDA’s Economic Research Service found that auto-steer guidance systems — the entry point for most precision-ag and remote-sensing workflows — were used on 73% of the largest corn farms versus 10% of the smallest in 2016; 82% of the largest winter wheat farms versus 7% of the smallest in 2017; 68% of the largest soybean farms versus 11% of the smallest in 2018; and 67% of the largest cotton farms versus 50% of the smallest in 2019, per USDA ERS’s Chart of Note, published February 24, 2023. Cotton is the outlier — even small cotton operations had adopted guidance at half the rate of the largest ones, likely because cotton pickers require GPS row-following to run efficiently regardless of acreage.

Independent research backs the underlying method, not just the adoption trend. A Michigan State University study covering 352 fields across Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa — more than 2,500 yield-map records in total — combined a Landsat-derived chlorophyll vegetation index with a cumulative drought index to sharpen in-season yield predictions, and reported that adding those two satellite-derived variables measurably improved forecast accuracy over models that used weather and soil data alone, according to NASA’s summary of the research, published March 29, 2022. That’s the durable part of crop health analysis: the index and the comparison method don’t expire, even though this week’s NDVI reading will.

Oil and Gas Mineral Management: What the Job Involves

Oil and gas mineral management is the ongoing work of tracking a mineral interest through its whole life: confirming who owns it (an interest can be split, inherited, or sold in fractions many times over), verifying the lease and division-order terms attached to it, checking that royalty checks match actual reported production, and watching for new permits or offset wells that change its value. It is not the same job as land management in the surface-farming sense, even though the two frequently sit on the same acre — which is exactly why “land and mineral management” shows up as a distinct search term from either one alone.

The scale of what’s being managed is large and shrinking in well count even as it produces more. The number of producing oil and natural gas wells in the United States peaked at 1,031,161 in 2014, fell to 930,445 by 2023, and fell again to 918,481 in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Distribution of Wells report, published December 8, 2025 — the most recent edition of a report EIA reissues roughly once a year, so a newer count will eventually supersede these figures. Fewer wells producing more oil and gas overall is the multi-year pattern behind that decline; each remaining well carries more managed value, which is one reason accurate division-order and royalty tracking matters more than the raw well count alone suggests.

“Oil and gas mineral management software” — the more specific search a mineral owner or operator’s landman actually types in — refers to the systems that automate this checking rather than a single generic tool. Functionally, that category covers three jobs: (1) division-order and ownership tracking, so a transfer or death doesn’t quietly misdirect a check; (2) royalty verification, reconciling a check stub’s volumes and prices against the operator’s filed production and the state’s own production records; and (3) lease and permit monitoring, so an owner learns about a new offset well or expiring lease term before it’s too late to act. Whether that’s handled with dedicated software, a landman, or a spreadsheet and the state’s public production database, the three jobs are the same — which is the useful way to evaluate any tool or service sold under that name, including federal reporting: the Office of Natural Resources Revenue’s public data portal is one of the underlying production and revenue records any verification ultimately checks against.

Land and Mineral Management: Reading a Split Estate

In much of the western United States, the surface owner and the mineral owner are different parties — a “split estate.” The pattern traces back to the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916, which let settlers claim non-irrigable land for grazing while the federal government kept the subsurface mineral rights, per the Bureau of Land Management’s split-estate program page. The BLM manages roughly 700 million acres of federal subsurface mineral estate nationwide — more than double the 245 million acres of federal surface land the agency also manages, most of it concentrated in 12 western states — according to a BLM press release. That gap between the two figures is the split estate: millions of acres of privately owned surface — heavily concentrated in the Montana/Dakotas region, per the same release — sitting above minerals the federal government still owns and can lease for drilling, without the surface owner’s mineral consent.

That federal mineral estate produces real, trackable money, and the Department of the Interior publishes exactly where it goes every fiscal year. In fiscal year 2025, federal oil, gas, and mineral leasing generated $14.61 billion in revenue, disbursed as $5.01 billion to the U.S. Treasury, $4.07 billion to 34 states, $2.98 billion to the Reclamation Fund, $1.05 billion to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, $1.00 billion to tribes and roughly 31,000 individual Indian mineral owners, $350 million to federal agencies, and $150 million to the Historic Preservation Fund — per a Department of the Interior press release, published November 24, 2025. New Mexico alone received $2.76 billion of the state share, more than five times Wyoming’s $544.87 million, the next-largest recipient. The Department notes it has disbursed more than $402 billion in mineral leasing revenue since 1982 — a durable reminder that this is a permanent, recurring revenue stream tied to production, not a one-time windfall, and next fiscal year’s total will be published on the same DOI page.

On the leasing side that produces this revenue, BLM administered onshore federal oil and gas leases in producing status covering 12.4 million acres in FY2024 across 23,654 leases — nearly flat against 12.8 million acres and 23,770 leases in FY2015 — and those leases were more productive per acre than a decade earlier, per the Congressional Research Service’s federal leasing report, updated February 12, 2026 and available via EveryCRSReport.com. The federal onshore royalty rate itself is not fixed forever: it rose to 16⅔% under the Inflation Reduction Act starting August 16, 2022, then reverted to 12½% when the FY2025 reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21) repealed that change. That single number — the royalty percentage — is worth checking against current law before you run any calculation, because it has moved twice in four years and could move again.

One Satellite Backbone, Two Industries: Where Farmonaut Fits

Crop health analysis and mineral detection look unrelated from the ground, but they run on the same instruments in orbit: multispectral and hyperspectral sensors reading reflected light across wavelengths the human eye can’t separate. The bands tuned to chlorophyll and canopy moisture for a corn field are adjacent, on the same sensor, to the bands tuned to iron oxide, clay alteration, and other mineral signatures used in exploration. Farmonaut runs both workflows from that shared foundation rather than building two separate platforms.

On the mineral side, that means identifying alteration halos, structural targets, and drilling priorities from orbit before any ground crew is mobilized — shifting early-stage exploration from a months-long field campaign to a desk review measured in days, and reducing the acreage that needs to be walked, drilled, or disturbed to answer the same targeting question. Learn more about Farmonaut’s satellite-based mineral detection, or go directly to Map Your Mining Site Here to run a site through the platform.

For teams that need to go beyond a flat map, Farmonaut also produces satellite-driven 3D mineral prospectivity mapping — a georeferenced view of vein structure and depth intended to sharpen where a drill program actually goes, rather than where a 2D anomaly map suggests it might.

Farmonaut reports its own exploration screening work as having covered more than 80,000 hectares across 18 countries to date, and separately estimates — as a company figure rather than an independent audit — that satellite-based mineral screening can cut exploration costs by up to 85% against a ground-survey-first approach, mainly by ruling out low-probability ground before anyone mobilizes equipment to it. Treat both as vendor-reported figures to weigh alongside your own project’s numbers, not as substitutes for your own due diligence.

Crop Health Analysis vs. Mineral Management, Side by Side

These two disciplines get confused mainly because both are called “monitoring” and both use satellites. The table below is the practical difference — what each one tracks, how often the number changes, and how you check it yourself, which is the part a generic AI summary of either topic tends to skip.

Verify Your Own Numbers — and a Royalty Calculator

Every figure in this article carries a refresh path — the same government page it came from will carry a newer number when one exists. Use this checklist rather than trusting a snapshot:

• ✔ Crop condition: Pull the current week’s release from USDA’s Crop Progress and Condition page and compare it to your own field’s satellite trend, not to last month’s article.
• ✔ Well counts and production: Check EIA’s Distribution of Wells report for the current annual edition — it’s reissued roughly once a year.
• ✔ Federal royalty rate: Confirm the current onshore rate before running any calculation; it has changed twice since 2022 and is set by statute, not by convention.
• ✔ Split-estate status of a specific parcel: A title search or your local BLM office, not a national average, tells you whether your own surface acre sits above federally owned minerals.
• ✔ Royalty math on your own check: Reconcile the volume and price on your check stub against the operator’s filed production for that lease before assuming the deduction line is correct.

That last point is the one most mineral owners never actually do. Below is a simple royalty estimator built on the mechanics described above — gross value, an optional post-production deduction, your royalty rate, and your net revenue interest — so you can sanity-check a statement with your own numbers instead of someone else’s.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is crop health analysis?

Crop health analysis is the use of satellite or aerial multispectral imagery — most often converted into NDVI or a similar vegetation index — to detect plant stress before it’s visible to the eye, then cross-checked against ground data such as USDA’s weekly Crop Progress condition ratings. It’s a diagnostic layer, not a replacement for field scouting.

What does oil and gas mineral management actually cover?

It covers ownership tracking (who holds the mineral interest and in what fraction), lease and division-order administration, royalty verification against reported production, and monitoring for new permits, transfers, or lease expirations that change the interest’s value. “Oil gas and mineral management services” and “mineral managing” describe the same set of tasks — the wording just varies by who’s searching.

How is land and mineral management different from mineral management alone?

Mineral management on its own focuses on the subsurface interest — ownership, leasing, royalties. Land and mineral management adds the surface layer: farming, grazing, or development use of the same acre, and the coordination needed when a split estate means a different party owns what’s underneath. The two overlap wherever federal or severed minerals sit under private or agricultural surface.

Where can I check who owns the minerals under a specific piece of land?

Start with a title search at the county recorder’s office, since mineral ownership is recorded there like any other property interest. For federally owned minerals under private surface, your local BLM office can confirm status, and the BLM’s own split-estate program page explains how that federal/private division works and who to contact.

How current are the well-count and revenue figures in this article?

The well counts are 2024 data published by EIA on December 8, 2025, in a report EIA reissues roughly annually. The $14.61 billion federal mineral-revenue figure is for fiscal year 2025, published by DOI on November 24, 2025; DOI publishes a new figure for each fiscal year. Check the linked source pages directly for whichever figure has since superseded these.

How do I get satellite-based mineral intelligence for a specific site?

Go to Map Your Mining Site Here to run Farmonaut’s platform against your own coordinates, or request a scoped estimate through the mining query form. For technical questions outside either of those, use Contact Us.

Conclusion

“Crop health analysis” and “oil and gas mineral management” get treated as one blurry topic mainly because both involve satellites, both involve land, and both get summarized in a sentence by search results that skip the mechanics. They’re not one topic. Crop health analysis is a weekly-refreshed comparison between your field’s spectral signal and USDA’s ground rating. Mineral management is an ownership-and-payment ledger that changes with every transfer, lease, and royalty statement. Neither one is answered by a single static number — which is exactly why each source linked above publishes a newer figure on a fixed schedule, and why the checklist and calculator above are built to outlast today’s numbers rather than repeat them.