Determining Corn Aflatoxin Risk within Counties in Southern Georgia, USA using Remotely Sensed Data

Aflatoxin contamination of food can cause liver cancer in humans and animals. Identification of aflatoxin risk areas allows farmers to adapt management strategies before planting, during growth and at harvest. Aflatoxin contamination is driven by high temperatures and drought conditions and crops grown on light textured soil in the south eastern USA are at particular risk. Aflatoxin assessment is expensive so a role of extension services in precision farming is to identify the areas most at risk of contamination so that farmers can adapt irrigation or planting strategies. This paper extends a county-level risk factors approach developed by Kerry et al. (2017) by investigating the use of NDVI and thermal IR data to indicate drought stress and thus aflatoxin contamination risk at the sub-county level.