peer reviewed ; The Belgian potato processing industry has known a spectacular growth during the last decades. The companies active in this sector (most of them family owned enterprises) have succeeded – together with primary producers and traders – to grow from 500.000 tons of processed potatoes in 1990 till 3.650.000 tons of raw material in 2012. When considering the production (in tons) per habitant, Belgium is ranked on the 4th place with a production of 395 tons per 1.000 inhabitants. Nowhere in the world are higher yields obtained than in Belgium. To keep up its position on the forefront of innovation, the potato processing industries are continuously looking at promising novel technologies that could improve business processes at any stage of growth. The close follow up of parcels on the land as form above is becoming an important tool to improve the quantity and the quality of the potato crop, and reduce the risks in order to plan the storage, packaging or processing and as such to strengthen the competiveness of the Belgian potato in a global market. The iPot project, financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), aims to provide the Belgian potato sector, represented by Belgapom, with near real time information on field condition (weather-soil) and crop development, and with early yield estimates, derived from a combination of satellite images and crop growth models. Satellite images are used since long for crop monitoring at regional level by the public sector. Traditionally, low to medium resolution images, with pixel sizes from 250m to 1km are used for providing information on crop growth and development, and on yield at regional scale. However, the recent launch of constellations of high resolution optical sensors (DMC, Sentinel-2) offering spatially detailed information (20m pixel size) at high frequency (every 2 to 3 days) and at low cost, is creating a (r)evolution in the world of crop monitoring. Automatic processing chains have been developed to derive vegetation indices (NDVI) and ...