As calibrated and timely data become increasingly available during the 1990s, microwave remote sensing scientists are beginning to view vegetation monitoring as an achievable goal. Vegetation monitoring will lead to the development of crop information systems, which in turn would provide useful predictions of crop conditions. As an example of assessing crop conditions, a drought-stress detection study was undertaken using airborne C-HH SAR data. Tone and texture features were evaluated and compared as measures of separability for drought-stress in agricultural crops. Drought-stressed wheat was always separable from all other crop types and conditions. However, drought-stressed barley and canola were less separable, and drought-stressed peas were often confused with “good” pea crops and all canola crops. The tonal domain is preferred to the textural domain for this approach because it produces similar results with lower computational demands. The results are discussed with regard to potential methodologies and future research requirements, as they relate to RADARSAT and other planned spaceborne SAR systems.