Abstract
The inability of a farmer to plant an insured crop by the policy’s final planting date can pose financial challenges for the grower and cause reduced production for a widely impacted region. Prevented planting is primarily caused by excess moisture or rainfall such as the catastrophic flooding and widespread conditions that prevented active field work in the midwestern region of United States in 2019. While the Farm Service Agency reports the number of such “prevent plant” acres each year at the county scale, field-scale maps of prevent plant fields—which would enable analyses related to assessing and mitigating the impact of climate on agriculture—are not currently available. The aim of this study is to demonstrate a method for mapping likely prevent plant fields based on flood mapping and historical cropland maps. We focused on a study region in eastern South Dakota and created flood maps using Landsat 8 and Sentinel 1 images from 2018 and 2019. We used automatic threshold-based change detection using NDVI and NDWI to accentuate changes likely caused by flooding. The NDVI change detection map showed vegetation loss in the eastern parts of the study area while NDWI values showed increased water content, both indicating possible flooding events. The VH polarization of Sentinel 1 was also particularly useful in identifying potential flooded areas as the VH values for 2019 were substantially lower than those of 2018, especially in the northern part of the study area, likely indicating standing water or reduced biomass. We combined the flood maps from Landsat 8 and Sentinel 1 to form a complete flood likelihood map over the entire study area. We intersected this flood map with a map of fallow pixels extracted from the Cropland Data Layer to produce a map of predicted prevent plant acres across several counties in South Dakota. The predicted figures were within 10% error of Farm Service Agency reports, with low errors in the most affected counties in the state such as Beadle, Hanson, and Hand.
Highlights
Prevented planting is defined as the inability of a farmer to plant an insured crop by the final planting date outlined in the insurance policy [1]
The prevent planting acres in the midwestern states were primarily due to a combination of extreme levels of rainfall coupled with an explosive cyclogenesis that caused large volumes of rain and snow to fall, leading to more than 4 billion USD in crop insurance claims [3]
We evaluated our remote sensing-based estimates of prevent plant acreage by comparing to official estimates from the Farm Service Agency
Summary
Prevented planting is defined as the inability of a farmer to plant an insured crop by the final planting date outlined in the insurance policy [1]. This is typically due to extreme weather conditions such as excessive rainfall, hurricanes, or drought. The prevent planting acres in the midwestern states were primarily due to a combination of extreme levels of rainfall coupled with an explosive cyclogenesis (popularly termed “bomb cyclone”) that caused large volumes of rain and snow to fall, leading to more than 4 billion USD in crop insurance claims [3].
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