Fodder Quality Assessment Through Remote Sensing: A Review

This paper reviews the approach and techniques of remote sensing based fodder quality estimation.Timely knowledge of the fodder quality is important to meet the demands in the animal feeding. Remote sensing (RS) is a promising technology for assessing farm level fodder quality as compared to conventional methods. Various studies have been conducted on RS based fodder quality assessment at the farm level in the last two decades. In most of the studies handheld spectroscopy has been used for the small farm area, and aircraft or an unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV)-based Hyperspectral imagery (HSI) or spectroscopy for the large area. In most of the studies, spectroscopy has been commonly used for fodder quality assessment to extract crude protein (CP), neutral detergent fibre (NDF), dry matter (DM) and acid detergent fibre (ADF) parameters for limited areas. While aircraft or UAV-based spectroscopy is being used for the large areas. These studies also suggest that multi-spectral imagery (MSI) data can be captured using UAVs and the Sentinel-2A/B satellite, while HSI data can be acquired by handheld or UAV-based hyperspectral cameras.