After conducting a 2023 trial with a few trusted DAS customers, we are pleased to announce that crop estimates for summer crops will be available to all interested organisations in the 2023/2024 summer cropping season.

Results of the first summer crop estimates

In the past summer crop season, the DAS team achieved overall model accuracy of 98.9%, which provided many opportunities for learning. We deliberately took the approach of focusing first on achieving useful results for cotton and sorghum in the major growing regions, with the intent to expand geographically and improve accuracy for minor crops this coming season.

Cotton classification accuracy was 99.9%. From 2,702 ground truth points in our test set our model only got four wrong. This provided our customers with the location of every cotton crop, and highly accurate estimates of the areas planted to cotton.

Sorghum accuracy was 97.7%, rice was 100% (from 45 samples in the test set) and corn was 95.5%. 

Plans and expectations for Summer 2023/2024

We expect our accuracy for the minor crops to improve not only for this coming season but also the years beyond that. This prediction is based on the year-on-year improvements in accuracy we have seen over the five seasons DAS has been delivering winter crop estimates, which are leveraged by public and private entities alike including the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Crop monitoring will continue for more than 445,000 paddocks in New South Wales and Queensland, with accuracy calculated as the number of correct predictions as a proportion of total ground truth points, both overall and for each crop type. In addition to this, our team will expand this monitoring to include summer cropping areas of Victoria.

DAS will continue to harness advances in Earth Observation and remote sensing, coupled with advanced machine learning analytics to scale accurate, reliable, timely and valuable crop reporting. This includes testing, training and validating our models against ground truth data to match conditions on the ground.

How can your organisation receive DAS summer crop intelligence?

Fill out our contact form below and our team will connect with you to discuss the forthcoming summer season crop estimates.

Follow DAS on Linkedin for news and updates