System AMS mistook buckwheat for beets and a tree for rapeseed. "We are aware of its imperfections"

The AMS system is not, however, the sole source of verification for farmers' subsidy applications nor the direct basis for imposing fines or sanctions, the Ministry of Agriculture emphasizes. Agricultural self-government reported problems encountered by farmers in connection with the AMS satellite monitoring system (area monitoring system). They receive, as we also wrote, email and SMS notifications about "yellow" and "red" signals in the system, indicating potential irregularities in crop declarations for direct subsidies. "In practice, the system often misidentifies the type of crop. There have been cases where the system indicated buckwheat instead of sugar beet, fruit trees instead of rapeseed, and rye instead of wheat. In such situations, ARiMR (Agency for Restructuring and Modernization of Agriculture) requires confirmation of the crop with a geotagged photo. The problem is that in many cases, the field already contains subsequent crops (e.g., winter rapeseed), not the ...