Farm Action Toolkit Reveals Two Decades of Cropland Changes in Mountainous Bhutan for Sustainability

Bhutan’s Five-Year Strategic Plan (FYP) is the country’s primary instrument for guiding national development, resource allocation, and policy interventions. To track progress towards the central goals of the FYP regarding food security and self-sufficiency, Bhutan needs spatiotemporally explicit and accurate data on agricultural land use. However, cropland monitoring in Bhutan is challenging because only ~7% of its landmass is arable and over 80% of croplands are in rugged, high-elevation terrain. This study fills this gap in Bhutan’s agricultural data monitoring with the Farm Action Toolkit (FAcT), an AI-enabled, remote sensing-based service that maps cropland and paddy area dynamics from 2002 to 2024, providing first national, comprehensive, validated, field-scale cropland dataset. FAcT demonstrated strong performance for both cropland and paddy extent classifications with an average overall accuracy ranging from 87% to 92% and R² values between 0.75 and 0.85 compared to government estimates over two decades. With FAcT, Bhutan can evaluate both the historic and ongoing impacts of FYP interventions, offering a robust, evidence-based framework for agricultural support policy analysis. For example, FAcT reveals a 20% increase in cropland area between 2002 and 2024, consistent with climate-resilient agriculture related investments under the 9 ^th ,10 ^th ,11 ^th FYPs. Meanwhile, 66% of lost cropland area post-2018 reverted to forest, reflecting the 12th FYP’s conservation priorities. During the same period, net primary productivity (NPP) declined by 2%, and per-capita cropland and paddy areas fell by 16% and 22% respectively, underscoring demographic pressure and land-use competition. FAcT outputs are now guiding the implementation of 13th FYP, which emphasizes commercial agriculture, sustainability, and equity. Notably, FAcT-derived maps could extend subsidies and tax benefits to additional farmers, particularly those not reached by prior survey-based systems. The co-development approach adopted in this study enhanced scientific methodology and facilitated institutional uptake, enabling operational use by national stakeholders. All code and datasets are openly available at https://zenodo.org/records/15621464, offering a scalable tool for strengthening food system resilience, sustainable land management, and evidence-based decision-making in smallholder, high-elevation, and data-scarce contexts. The findings contribute directly to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2, 11, and 15, advancing sustainable agriculture and climate resilience in mountainous regions.