Field management
External damage to crops: livestock, machinery and theft
External damage is harm to a crop caused by people or animals: livestock grazing, crop theft, unauthorised driving or ploughing, and trampling. The damage is usually local, often linear or irregular in shape, and cannot be explained by agronomy. It leads to local yield losses.
Crops: Cotton, Wheat, Rice
When it is dangerous
It can happen at any stage once the crop canopy is developed. Crop theft is most likely just before harvest. Fields near roads and villages, in border areas and next to pastures are hit most often.
Causes
- Grazing by livestock
- Crop theft
- Unauthorised driving or ploughing
- Trampling
Signs on the field
- A patch of the field where greenness has dropped sharply
- Linear machinery tracks or livestock trails
- Patches of bare soil, often at the field edge or by a road
How ClusterOS notices it
In 10 m Sentinel-2 optical images ClusterOS can spot a sharp local drop in greenness or exposed soil – a reason to check, not proof. Small and linear tracks, let alone the animals themselves, are not visible at this resolution: that takes sub-metre imagery, which is not in our data set. This damage is easy to confuse with hail, lodging or harvest, so only a visit by an agronomist and a field report confirm it reliably.
What to do
- When a signal appears, visit the field and write a field report
- Photograph the damage and mark it on the field map
- Fence fields next to pastures and roads against livestock
- Step up field security before harvest
Questions
Can livestock damage be seen from a satellite?
Only indirectly. A 10 m image shows a patch where greenness dropped sharply, but not the tracks or the animals. That needs imagery finer than a metre per pixel, and confirmation comes from a field inspection.
How do you confirm external damage to a crop?
With a visit by an agronomist and a field report. The satellite signal helps find the location of the change quickly, but on its own it does not prove the cause.
Learn about this risk on your fields before it becomes a loss
We will show ClusterOS on your own fields: history since 2019, crop stage and all 24 risks.
Other risks in «Field management»
Scientific basis
- Sensing and Mapping the Effects of Cow Trampling on the Soil Compaction of the Montado Mediterranean Ecosystem (2023), PMC9862033
- Remote sensing colour image semantic segmentation of trails created by large herbivorous mammals (2025), arXiv:2504.12121
- Automated aerial animal detection when spatial resolution conditions are varied (2022), DOI: 10.1016/j.compag.2022.106740