Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe provides detailed photos that can be used by businesses to watch the competition from a safe distance - 280 miles above the Earth.

The Florida Department of Citrus recently used this legal form of spying. Florida and Brazil compete for 90 percent of the world's orange-juice business. Florida citrus growers first used the satellite technology to look at their own crops and then to watch their toughest competitor - the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The quality of the photos allow viewers to count individual treetops and thus make predictions on crop production. Those forecasts are used to determine prices for the coming season.

DigitalGlobe's photos also are used by logging companies to count trees and by the U.S. Forest Service to help with remediation after forest fires.

"There's a lot of things they can read from this technology that has all kinds of potential for agriculture," said Jim Reis, president of the World Trade Center in Denver.

U.S. crop cooperatives can get satellite photos taken over other countries to check out how well agricultural production is going that year, he said. It's a good way to keep track of the competition without doing it the old-fashioned way. Competitors used to have to resort to driving by a rival to determine how well business was going, Reis said.

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