When?

It is often important to know the timing of key stages in crop development: planting, flowering, and harvest. In this chapter we show methods to estimate these events with three different approaches. The first chapter shows how a simple algorithm that uses monthly rainfall can be used. The next chapters show increasingly complex approaches with the ecocrop model <ecocrop.html> and with a crop growth simulation model. In chapter four, satellite remote sensing data is used. In the final chapter we compare and discuss results obtained with these methods with data from crop calendar databases.