Ley field management using satellite based digital tools

Forage grasslands are the most important crop in Nordic countries and the main feeding source for ruminant industries. Improving the economic and ecological performances of farms requires useful and timely field-specific information. Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites provide high-resolution open-access imageries that can be used for near-real-time monitoring of vegetation. In this study, forage yield and quality across Sweden were estimated using satellite data from the Sentinel-1 and -2 missions from the European Space Agency (ESA) and weather data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) processed using machine learning-based random forest algorithms. The combination of Sentinel-1 and -2 satellites and weather data showed good potential for estimating forage crop parameters (R2 ranging from 0.42 to 0.73 for the model validation). In the future, the forage biomass and quality estimation models will be integrated into an online open-access decision support system (www.cropsat.se), which can help farmers to make decisions, such as fertilization and harvest timing