Monitor reports observed field practices in distinct cultivation cycles. Learn how cultivation cycles work, and how to use them.
A cultivation cycle represents the time period on a field where a commodity crop was grown. It includes the management events that went into preparing the field for planting, improving the soil and the actual time the commodity is growing.
Cultivation cycles in Monitor are defined as the day after the harvest of a commodity to the harvest of the next commodity crop. It includes all the events that happened between those two dates.
You can think of cultivation cycles as a grouping of all the management activities that support growing a crop. In practice this typically includes post-harvest tillage from the previous commodity, a cover crop assessment, a pre-plant tillage and the commodity crop.
Why is reporting cultivation cycles valuable?
- Cultivation cycles provide a logical grouping for field-level practices that allows for contextualizing which practices are in support of growing a crop.
- Cultivation cycles provide a reporting structure that is used to quantify emissions associated with a single commodity crop. This is important in regions where more than one commodity crop is grown on a field over a crop year.
How does cultivation cycle reporting work in Monitor?
When you request field practice data from Monitor, you also provide a flexible time period over which you want field insights for (for example it could be a single year or a 5-year period). A complete cultivation cycle will be returned for each commodity crop detected over the requested time period. For example, if a two-year request is made to Monitor where corn is detected in the first year and soybean the next year, there will be two cultivation cycles (one for each of the corn and soybean).
Monitor returns cultivation inclusive of the start date and end date of the requested time period. This means that cultivation cycles do not have to be fully contained within the requested window to be returned. For example if the user requests a start date for field data of October 1, but the cultivation cycle starts on Sept 15th, the entire cycle will be returned even though it starts before the requested start date.
The cultivation cycle will also include the pre-plant and post-harvest tillage observation, as well as the cover crop observation from the period between the previous commodity and the current one. In practice, this means the cultivation cycle will contain the cover crop that was planted before the commodity crop is planted (assuming the field had a cover crop).
Understanding the cultivation cycle schema
Monitor’s cultivation cycles are reported within a distinct array in the Monitor `row crop data` results. Cultivation cycle objects contain metadata including the start date, end date and a unique identifier for the cycle. The cultivation cycle ID is reported along with each practice observed on the field, to indicated which cycle the practice belongs to.
Schema definitions:
-
row_crop_data: an object containing information about observed field practices, including main crop, tillage, green cover and cultivation cycles for a field-
errors: An array of errors or information messages about the observed practices -
cultivation_cycles: An array of cultivation cycle objects observed over the requested time window, containing metadata about cultivation cycles on a field-
start date: The day after the harvest of the previous commodity crop, in the format of YYYY-MM-DD -
end date: The day of the harvest of the commodity crop reported in the cultivation cycle, in the format of YYYY-MM-DD -
id: unique identifier for a cultivation cycle, used to related crop, tillage and green cover objects to a cultivation cycle
-
-
main_crop: An array of commodity crops detected over the requested window -
tillage: An array of pre-plant and post-harvest tillage observations analyzed over the requested time window -
green_cover: An array of cover crop observations over the requested time window
-
Example Monitor results schema
"row_crop_data": {
"errors": [],
"cultivation_cycles": [
{
"cycle": 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6,
"start_date": "2020-09-01",
"end_date": "2021-09-15"
},
{
"cycle": 5a105e8b9d40e1329780d62ea2265d8a,
"start_date": "2021-09-16",
"end_date": "2022-10-15"
}
]
"green_cover": [
{
"start_date": "2021-09-01",
"end_date": "2022-03-31",
"green_cover_class": "Potential cover crop",
"emergence_quality": "Adequate emergence",
"living_root_score": 25.7,
"living_root_quality_score": 3.07,
"valid_obs_pct": 1,
"healthy_vegetation_coverage_percent": 0.69,
"vegetation_vigor": 0.44,
"overall_conf": 0.71,
"cultivation_cycle": 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6
}
],
"main_crop_type": [
{
"crop_type": "barley",
"plant_date": "2021-04-15",
"harvest_date": "2021-08-28",
"crop_type_conf": 95.13333333333334,
"cultivation_cycle": 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6
},
{
"crop_type": "other_small_grain",
"plant_date": "2022-04-05",
"harvest_date": "2022-09-02",
"crop_type_conf": 61.57142857142857,
"cultivation_cycle": 5a105e8b9d40e1329780d62ea2265d8a
}
],
"tillage": [
{
"start_date": "2021-10-01",
"end_date": "2021-10-31",
"tillage_intensity": "Conventional tillage",
"residue_pct": 15,
"residue_conf": 2,
"cultivation_cycle": 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6
},
{
"start_date": "2022-03-01",
"end_date": "2022-03-31",
"tillage_intensity": "Conventional tillage",
"residue_pct": 15,
"residue_conf": 3,
"cultivation_cycle": 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6
}
]
}
}
Cultivation cycle FAQs
How do cultivation cycles work when the field is fallow?
‘Fallow’ is reported from Monitor as if it were a crop type. This means that when a field is fallow during a time period that there is normally a commodity crop growing, the main crop type will be reported as fallow, and the fallow cycle will have it’s own cultivation cycle.
How do cultivation cycles work when there is a perennial crop on the field?
Monitor does not currently support reporting for perennial crops. However, Monitor’s Crop Detection models can detect perennial crop types. In order to provide the most amount of useful data to Monitor consumers, select perennial crops may be reported from Monitor when detected on a field, but will be reported in the format of an annual cultivation cycle. For example, if sugarcane is grown on a field for 5 years, there could be up to 5 cultivation cycles reported from Monitor, that align with the expected harvest cycles of the sugarcane (in this case, typically a yearly harvest).
How long are cultivation cycles?
The length of cultivation cycles can vary, as they are determined by the length of the crop growing season, and the amount of time between commodity crops. On fields where one commodity is grown per 12-month period, it’s common for cultivation cycles to be approximately 12 months in length. In regions where crops are grown in immediate succession, cultivation cycle length may correspond more closely to the length of time the crop is in the ground.