Abstract: Northwest China's Xingjiang Autonomous Region is a major cotton production area in China. It is essential for cotton production and trade management to collect objective and timely information of cotton growing area at a national level. So far West China's Landsat TM image can not be received efficiently in China and it is impossible to monitor Xingjiang's cotton area using remote sensing for China Ministry of Agriculture before the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS-1) was launched in 1999 and operationally used in 2000. The objective of this research is to evaluate the possibility of agricultural application with CBERS-1 data. In the recent two years, a satellite remote sensing based approach for cotton growing area monitoring in Northwest China using CBERS-1 data was developed and operationally used in China Ministry of Agriculture.