An automatic approach was presented to extract the sugarcane planting area for the mixed vegetation and hilly region in Guangxi province by using the moderate spatial and high temporal resolution MODIS data. The samples of a tra ining region were selected by GPS and the temporal variation curve of NDVI was w orked out. The maximum likelihood method was used to extract the information of sugarcane planting area and its spatial distribution through calculating the multiple phase MODISNDVI. The comparison of results from remote sensing image s with the investigations by GPS shows that the sugarcane planting area can be e xtracted from MODIS data, and the accuracy is more than 90%.