The Agricultural Service of AMESD provides products and tools to allow agricultural remote sensing analysts to describe factors affecting agriculture during the season.

The main goal is to enable the Ministries of Agriculture in the participating SADC countries to perform Crop Condition Monitoring, but also to provide them with a view to forecasting yield and production scenarios. Based on the agricultural products, the analysts can present the relevant information to decision makers in the form of a report or bulletin at a time interval of 10 days to 1month.

These Products include a set of thematic documents provided in the form of maps, graphs and written reports. The algorithms and the processing chains for each product will be provided.

The tools and products of the service will focus on the data acquisition, analysis and dissemination of information relevant to agricultural production and environmental assessments.

The Agricultural service will collect, analyze and disseminate information on crops characteristics. This will assist the analysts and decision makers in answering the following questions:

• What crops are where?
• What is the crop condition?
• What is the crop stage?

Farming

• What is the likely yield?

The service provides products which are intended to cover most of the information requirements of decision-makers and of the Institutions interested in crop monitoring and food security. The products of the Agriculture Service are also addressed to monitoring the environment and provide an early warning tool for possible hazards.

There are four groups of products which are based on autonomous data sources, integrated in the GIS and which allow the analysis from different perspectives.

These are:

• Baseline Products: Maps and spatial documents at the origin of all the processing chains

• Products for meteorological monitoring from remote sensing sources and from ground measurements.

• Products for vegetation monitoring from remote sensing data sources