Some of the largest buyers of Australian commodities nationally are taking advantage of DAS’ first summer crop estimates, which presents area estimates for cotton, sorghum, rice and corn in New South Wales and Queensland.

DAS is proud that overall model accuracy was 98.9% for our first summer cropping season, which has provided many opportunities for learning. We’ve deliberately taken 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 next.

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

We expect our accuracy for the minor crops to improve with every season and every year, off the back of what’s now more than four seasons delivering winter crop estimates, which are leveraged by public and private entities alike including the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

For our latest summer crop estimates, DAS is leveraging machine learning to predict crop type across more than 445,000 paddocks, with accuracy calculated as the number of correct predictions as a proportion of total ground truth points, both overall and for each crop type.

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 analytics, as changing climate patterns continue. This includes testing, training and validating our models against ground truth data to match conditions on the ground, as well as enhancing boundary datasets.

Pictured: Grain receival site in Kimba, South Australia. Silo art on the Viterra grain silos was completed in September 2017 by Melbourne artist Cam Scale and took 26 days and 200 litres of paint to complete.

If you want to find out more about accessing Summer Crop estimates or our Grain Intelligence datapack for 2023, including Winter Crop estimates, please access the brochure here and our team will reach out.