Remote Sensing Methods for Field Quality Assessment and Scoring - Towards Sustainable Field Reform

Finnish agriculture has been suffering on weak profitability for a long time. Reijo Karhinen published a report on 7 February 2019 where he proposed a broad and ambitious development program on agricultural lands called “Peltoreformi 2025”, which aims to improve profitability. The land consolidations and voluntary land exchanges improve efficiency notably due to larger fields and shorter traffic inside the farm. A way suggested to boost the structure of arable land is to build a uniform field scoring system throughout Finland. The production potential of the field is an essential part of the scoring system, but its evaluation is challenging, but important for farmers' overall acceptance. Modern remote sensing technology, especially drones and new-generation of satellites, has not yet been fully utilized in these tasks. In this project, digitalization and modern remote sensing technology will be harnessed to enable the improvement of the field sturctures and “Peltoreformi 2025”-project. The main goal of the project is to develop objective and efficient techniques for field assessment with remote sensing measurements. The project will investigate the feasibility and development needs of the PeltoOptimi-tool in the context of changing the field parcel sturcture. The work will develop drone and satellite based measurement methods to determine quality parameters that affect the productivity of the fields. These include, but are not limited to, the surface area and shape of the field, quality of the drainage system, condensation, soil type, nutrient content of the soil and topography. The aim of the project is to accelerate the development of farm land and voluntary land transactions and land exchanges, both economically and environmentally beneficial for farmers, and thus contribute to improving the profitability and sustainablity of agriculture. The information provided by the project on the factors affecting the production capacity of the field will also help in the planning of land improvement measures after any arrangements.