Common Agricultural Policy monitoring with Earth Observation

Common Agricultural Policy monitoring with Earth Observation 

Which software for checking farmers declaration will fit your needs? What kind of properties does it need? Read the article below to learn why cloud infrastructure meets all the requirements for running CAP software. 

The New CAP: 2023-27 

The European Commission (EC) sees great potential in Earth Observation techniques. Therefore, it is constantly encouraging to use them in various domains. Special pressure is put on the public sector, where the EC uses a wide range of enhancements and tools included in the adopted legislation. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the major regulations where satellite data plays a crucial role. The obligation to use it in the integrated administration and control system (IACS) was planned to be implemented in 2022, however, it has recently been moved to 2023. Therefore, the institutions responsible for checking farmers' declarations across Europe have gained one more year for testing and learning how to use these novel technologies in an effective and convenient way.  

Why satellite data are important for CAP

EO data is widely used in agriculture and its benefits are well known. The European Commission aims to take advantage of them in various areas of CAP monitoring. The law defines incentives and complementary schemes for farmers who consciously plan and work on their crops taking care of biodiversity and sustainable rural development.  It is important to both government agencies and farmers that everyone knows that the methods used for verifying farmers’ declarations are fair and transparent, such as the ones using satellite imagery. 

Which satellite software to choose for CAP monitoring 

There is plenty of software useful for implementing CAP Checking by Monitoring (CBM) requirements. There are open and commercial applications, simple or very advanced ones. A wide spectrum of available software may lead to a false assumption that the satellite technology is easy to use or develop by anyone. That might be true but only in terms of a few basic utilities like crop stress or anomaly monitoring using popular vegetation indexes. However, detailed crop classification or mowing and crop diversification can be tricky. These tasks require expert knowledge and scientific background, together with using Artificial Intelligence technology combined with Big Data potential.  

Sen4CAP as a service on CREODIAS - implementations 

To meet the user expectations, CloudFerro has prepared dedicated Sen4CAP software ready-to-use on CREODIAS. It is easily adaptable to unique user requirements as it can be scaled and amended at any moment, depending on the scale and time range, storage and processing capabilities.  The state-of-the-art Sen4CAP open software has been created in an ESA funded project and has been tested by 29 institutions across Europe for the last 3 years. In over dozen of them Sen4CAP SaaS is now working operationally. The software is being constantly developed, and recently a new version 3.0 has been released.

Leading institutions are using CREODIAS for their CAP applications 

Joint Research Center (JRC) – a leading European scientific institution, has developed CbM software and is using CREODIAS as IaaS. The Polish Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARMA) entrusted CloudFerro with providing cloud infrastructure to operate advanced algorithms for CAP monitoring developed within EOStat project. Another example of the use of Sen4CAP is the implementation in the Swedish Board of Agriculture, covering mowing, grazing, sub package detection. To learn more about best practises of using Sen4CAP watch our webinar.

What is more, the European software is also implemented in Asia and both Americas using European cloud environments. Public institutions as well as commercial companies have chosen trustworthy and reliable solutions from the old continent for their local purposes and legislation. That proves uniformity and elasticity of CloudFerro tools and expertise. 

CREODIAS for all CAP software’s 

Whatever software you use, it can be installed and operationally used on CREODIAS. Our IaaS grants you quick and easy access to multiple petabytes of Copernicus, Landsat and Sentinel data. Moreover, CREODIAS cloud infrastructure provides the user with a flexible and scalable environment to perform even the most complex calculations. Safety and quality are assured. 

PhD Sylwia Nasiłowska, Project Manager at CloudFerro