Action AGRI4CAST

The Action is centred on the JRC's crop yield forecasting system aiming at providing accurate and timely crop yield forecasts and crop production biomass for the union territory and other strategic areas of the world. The System contributes to the evaluation of global productions in support to CAP management decision. In view of providing support to a re-viewed CAP for the next 10 years and the Climate Change policy agenda of the EC, studies on changing production scenarios based on climate change impact on agriculture will be implemented.

The rationale behind the crop forecasts at EU level is based on the lack of timely information to take rapid decision on CAP instruments during the year. In fact statistics are usually provided by member states to Eurostat and DG-AGRI with a time lag of several months relatively to the harvest. This delay affects decision making in planning tools related to the CAP for the next year as the European view is missing. The sooner this information on the harvest is available the better.

AGRI4CAST has been developing and operationally running a Crop Forecasting System since 1992 in order to provide timely crop production forecasts at European level. This system is able to monitor crop vegetation growth (cereal, oil seed crops, protein crops, sugar beet, potatoes, pastures, rice) and include the short-term effects of meteorological events on crop productions and to provide yearly yield forecasts on European crops.

The AGRI4CAST system, also known as the MARS Crop Yield Forecasting System, is made by remote sensing and meteorological observations, agro-meteorological modelling (Crop Growth Monitoring System (CGMS), MARS Model Library) and statistical analysis tools.

Besides, AGRI4CAST is the depositary of techniques developed using remote sensing and area frame sampling at European level to estimate crop areas.

For a description of the CGMS system, please go to the CGMS pages. These also contain links to the actual code of the crop simulation models.

For a live link into our data warehouse, please visit the MARS-OP pages. This site is managed, under a JRC contract, by Alterra, Wageningen. You will need to register to view to information materials.

For a link to our ImageServer, please visit the MARS STAT ImageServer application.

The results of the yield monitoring activities are synthesised as the MARS Bulletin, a report published regularly through the European growing season.