High Value Crop Monitoring for potato production

High-value crop monitoring (HiVaCroM) users are involved in some way with growing potatoes or managing potato production. The users have common objectives to grow high quality and pre-defined volumes of potatoes, and often encounter challenges associated with the natural variability inherent with growing crops. The challenges faced are to understand the potential yield of crops; estimation of optimum harvest dates to achieve the targeted yields; monitoring large and geographically distributed fields; and understanding long term and short term weather impacts. Meeting these challenges has often resulted in labour intensive activities of continuously surveying fields, gathering information, and making decisions based on that data. HiVaCroM provides services to address all these challenges, with the main objective to reduce the labour involved in collecting and interpreting information. This is achieved via the use of satellite imagery to routinely monitor the growing crop, and by collecting weather data either from a HiVaCroM weather station or national data source. The imagery and weather data is processed to determine the expected yields and optimum harvest dates, and the results are easily visualised and interpreted via an on-line web portal. The result is improved forecasting of yields with better business decision concerning over or under supply of produce.