Hear about the plant the month the ground breaks.

Most regional sales managers find out about a new plant the same way their competitors do. A paid project-lead service lists it once it has a name and a general contractor. A trade magazine runs the announcement. A dealer mentions it over coffee, or the economic development office puts out a press release with a governor in the photo. Each of those is real, and each comes after somebody has already decided to build.

By then the ground is often cleared and the owner's engineer has started talking to equipment makers. You send your first email into a conversation that is already under way, and the spec may already read like somebody else's catalogue. Meanwhile the clearing, the graded pad and the haul road that would have told you about the job were visible from above earlier, in a county you cover.

Nobody on your team is paid to drive the territory looking for bare dirt. Greenfield Watch does that part: it compares your watch area month to month and tells you where the ground just changed.

1. 2.1

   Alert

   Construction-start alert

   A dated alert for each new site: the location, and the month earthworks were first seen. It lands once per monthly pass and lists the new starts found in your watch area.

2. 2.2

   Map layer

   Watch-area map layer

   Every flagged site plotted across your territory, so you can see where new starts cluster and which counties are quiet. You can load it into the GIS or CRM map you already use.

3. 2.3

   Image pair

   Before and after pair

   The pass that shows bare or undisturbed land and the pass that shows the first break, side by side for each flagged site. Open it before you phone anyone, so you know what you are asking about.

1. 3.1

   Watch area in

   Send the territory you sell into: states, counties or a polygon you draw.

2. 3.2

   Imagery

   A monthly high-resolution satellite pass covers it.

3. 3.3

   Analysis

   Each pass is compared with the last for new clearing, grading and access-road cuts on previously undisturbed or bare land.

4. 3.4

   Delivery

   You get an alert with coordinates and the month of first break, plus the updated map layer and the image pair.

Use the alert as the first line in a new lead record. It tells you where and roughly when ground broke, not who is building it or what. Finding the owner, the engineer and the contractor is still your job, and the quickest way is the county records, the planning office or your own project-lead service, now that you know where to look.

The gain is timing. You may be asking about a project that has not reached the trade press yet, ahead of a rep whose lead list updates when the contractor is named. If the alert lands on a spot your CRM already knows, you have a cross-check on how far along it is.

1. Limit 1Monthly, not live

   One pass a month. Ground can break the day after a pass and will not appear until the next one, so an alert lags real-world ground break by up to a pass cycle. It is not a live feed and it does not watch continuously.

2. Limit 2Cloud

   Optical imagery needs a clear view. A cloudy month can push a pass later, and the alert then lands on the next clear pass, with the month of first break stated as the pass where it was first seen.

3. Limit 3Resolution floor

   At 0.5–2 m a pixel is large enough to show a cleared field, a graded pad or a haul road. It will not reliably catch small clearing, such as a single building lot or a short driveway cut. The page does not promise those.

4. Limit 4Earthworks, not projects

   The signal is cleared and graded land. Greenfield Watch cannot tell you what is being built, who owns it, whether it is permitted or whether it is a plant at all. A new subdivision, a farm pond and a solar array can all start with bare dirt.

5. Limit 5Not a pipeline guarantee

   A flagged site is a site where earth moved. It does not mean a project will finish or buy equipment, and no number of alerts per territory is promised.