Glossary
Key terms and concepts in agricultural APIs and precision farming.
Key terms and concepts in agricultural APIs and precision farming.
Crop scouting is the systematic inspection of growing crops to identify and document issues such as pest infestations, disease pressure, nutrient deficiencies, weed competition, and weather damage. For developers building agricultural software, scouting data represents georeferenced field observations that complement remote sensing and equipment data.
Traditional scouting involves an agronomist walking predetermined paths through a field, stopping at regular intervals to count insects, rate disease severity, or assess plant health. The scout records observations on paper or in a mobile app with GPS tagging.
Data-driven scouting uses remote sensing to direct where scouts should look. Instead of walking the entire field, an AI application can analyze NDVI imagery to identify anomalous zones and generate a prioritized scouting route. This dramatically reduces time in the field while increasing detection rates.
A scouting observation typically includes:
Scouting data closes the loop between remote observation and ground truth. Common use cases:
FieldMCP provides tools for reading and writing scouting observations. See the tools reference for available scouting operations.