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After 20 years research, crop monitoring using remote sensing is routinely used for the Ministry of Agriculture, China. As China is a large country with a complicated landscape, multi-crop systems and small family farms, the government needs an efficient operational system on a national scale. Many key techniques are yet to be developed. The main issues include remote sensing data processing, crop discrimination, crop area measurement, crop condition assessment, disaster monitoring, yield estimation, and operational system development. Based on the authors experience, the progress, problems and the main ideas for solutions of the operational system development on a national scale are discussed in this paper.