Published in Scientific Papers. Series "Management, Economic Engineering in Agriculture and rural development", Vol. 24 ISSUE 3
Written by Bozhidar IVANOV, Veselin KRUSTEV, Bojin BOJINOV

The article presents the post-hoc analysis on the crop yield forecasting on three crops across EU carried out by JRS-Mars: wheat, maize, sunflower. These crops, to less extent sunflower are one of the most widespread and grown crops across EU-27. The area occupied with those crops tallies up to 23 per cent of the utilized agricultural land and over 39 per cent of the arable land throughout EU, where in some members, including Bulgaria, their share exceeds 75 per cent of arable land. The main goal of the research is to investigate and through statistical analysis to reveal the statistical significance, effectiveness and accuracy of the crop yield forecast monitoring done by JRC-Mars, which is developed on remote sense monitoring and models set up in the of vegetation indices. The forecast results on March-April for wheat and June-July for grain maize and sunflower are juxtaposed by the actual data baseline yields. The goal of the paper is also complemented to analyze the differences in the forecast outcomes related to country’s specifics, crop sensitivity and forecast time coherences. The results demonstrate that such statistical analysis are quite relevant and convincing tools to illustrate and substantiate the level of reliability of yield forecasting and that vegetation indices are appropriate element for building up yield forecasting models.

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