Fields of The World: A Field Guide for Extracting Agricultural Field Boundaries

Abstract

Field boundary maps are a building block for agricultural data products and support crop monitoring, yield estimation, and disease estimation. This tutorial presents the Fields of The World (FTW) ecosystem: a benchmark of 1.6M field polygons across 24 countries, pre-trained segmentation models, and command-line inference tools. We provide two notebooks that cover (1) local-scale field boundary extraction with crop classification and forest loss attribution, and (2) country-scale inference using cloud-optimized data. We use MOSAIKS random convolutional features and FTW derived field boundaries to map crop type at the field level and report macro F1 scores of 0.65--0.75 for crop type classification with limited labels. Finally, we show how to explore pre-computed predictions over five countries (4.76M km\textsuperscript{2}), with median predicted field areas from 0.06 ha (Rwanda) to 0.28 ha (Switzerland).