Crop development
Late sowing of cotton and winter wheat
Sowing happened later than normal for the crop and district, or did not happen at all. Late sowing leaves less time for grain fill and ripening: cotton runs into autumn cold, and winter wheat enters winter without hardening. For cotton, each day of delay costs roughly 5.9–12.3 kg/ha of yield.
Crops: Cotton, Wheat
When it is dangerous
The risk is set once, between sowing and emergence. The normal sowing window is mid-April for cotton and from mid-September for winter wheat. In Khorezm the highest wheat yields, about 7.7 t/ha, came from sowing around 15 September.
Causes
- Late harvest of the previous crop – common when wheat follows cotton
- Waterlogged seedbed
- Shortage of labour or water
- No timely decision to sow
Signs on the field
- The field stays bare longer than normal
- Green-up comes later than on fields of the same crop in the district
- Growth started noticeably later than on the same field in past years
How ClusterOS notices it
From a series of Sentinel-2 optical images ClusterOS sees when a field started to green up and compares that date with the crop calendar for your district and with the field's past seasons. Sentinel-1 radar can see pre-sowing tillage even through clouds, but so far it only partly confirms the date – the main signal is optical. A cloudy spring can push the visible date later. Fallow and poor emergence are told apart by whether green-up happens at all and how strong it is.
What to do
- Confirm the actual sowing date and the crop – the assessment becomes more accurate
- Recalculate planned field operations for the actual sowing date
- Check whether the field will still fit the optimal harvest window
- Plan the rotation so that a late harvest of the previous crop does not delay the next sowing
Questions
How much yield does late cotton sowing cost?
Studies put the loss at roughly 5.9–12.3 kg/ha for each day of delay; data from Pakistan show about 7.6 kg/ha per day. Late cotton also risks meeting autumn cold before it finishes ripening.
When should winter wheat be sown in Uzbekistan?
The agronomic sowing window for winter wheat opens in mid-September. In Khorezm the highest yields, about 7.7 t/ha, came from sowing around 15 September. Sowing late after the cotton harvest lowers both yield and winter hardiness.
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 «Crop development»
Scientific basis
- Timing of planting is crucial for cotton yield, DOI: 10.1080/09064710510029178
- Data-Driven Agronomic Solutions to Close Wheat Yield Gaps... Uzbekistan, Agricultural Systems
- Downscaling model in agriculture in Western Uzbekistan, PMC8170174
- The Optimal Threshold and Vegetation Index Time Series for Retrieving Crop Phenology (2019), Remote Sensing 11(23):2725, DOI: 10.3390/rs11232725