Sentinel Satellite “Checks by Monitoring” Replace On-Farm CAP Inspections — Lithuania’s CAPCON Service

The EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) historically verified farmers' area-based subsidy claims — including agri-environmental and ecosystem-service payments — through physical on-the-spot inspections of a roughly 5% sample of applications each year. Following the 2017 Malta Declaration, the European Commission began piloting “Checks by Monitoring” (CbM): using Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical imagery, refreshed every five days, to continuously verify farm declarations instead of relying on annual sampling.

Lithuania's National Paying Agency contracted Geomatrix UAB to build the CAPCON service, drawing on the Sen4CAP toolchain co-developed by a KU Leuven-led, ESA-funded consortium. CAPCON became operational for the 2021 season, applying machine-learning classification to dense Sentinel-1 time series to confirm or flag per-parcel crop-type and land-use declarations (10+ crop types plus permanent/cultivated grassland and fallow) on rolling 10-day cycles, reaching approximately 94% classification accuracy on parcels above 0.5 ha, validated against standard EU Joint Research Centre methodology.

The European Court of Auditors' 2020 special report found that, across five early-adopter countries (Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Malta and Spain) covering over 4.5 million hectares, paying agencies cut the share of parcels needing physical field inspection to a maximum of 1%, down from the roughly 5% sample previously required — while noting that nearly 90% of paying agencies still considered the resulting volume of ambiguous, “yellow-flagged” parcels requiring manual follow-up a significant operational burden. Under EU Regulation 2021/2116, the resulting Area Monitoring System became a mandatory, EU-wide replacement for on-the-spot checks, phased in from January 2023 and required in all member states from January 2024.

Auditors also flagged that the Commission's roughly €480,000 subsidy for paying agencies' cloud-computing access in 2019 had a “value added… yet to be established,” and that the system verifies compliance with declared land use and management rules rather than independently measuring the ecological outcomes — carbon, biodiversity, water retention — of the schemes it monitors.

Read the full analysis: https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/new-tech-in-agri-monitoring-4-2020/en/