Which digital technologies hold the most commercial value for UK farms and how can they best be developed, integrated and managed to deliver that value in practice? Agrii digital agronomy development manager Lucy Cottingham explores a novel farm network set up to answer these and other future-focussed questions.
The pace of digital development is truly mesmerising these days. Hardly a week goes by when we don’t come across another data-driven opportunity offering to change the way we farm, whether it involves sensors, satellites, drones, apps, precision technologies, robots or some other artificial intelligence-led tool.
Today’s constantly-evolving technologies offer huge opportunities to improve our crop production efficiency; the timing and value of our agronomic decision-making; and our progress in meeting vital economic and environmental goals – not to mention production transparency and traceability demands.
Most of the growers we work with up and down the country appreciate the potential data-driven farming precision offers in a world of ever-increasing economic, legislative and climatic pressures. And many have been using a range of digital technologies for some time.
Even the most forward-thinking managers are, however, often finding it hard to see the wood for the trees in making many of these opportunities deliver at the bottom line. And, every bit as importantly, doing so easily and reliably with the least time and hassle.
They’ve been telling us they need better-researched evidence of the commercial value of the most promising digital technologies, better advice on making them work together, and better support in matching them to their own particular farming circumstances and needs.
So, as part of the Agrii R&D team’s wider technology strategy, we’ve done what we’ve long found works best in farming technology transfer. We’ve brought together a group of like-minded growers and agronomists to explore how data from a variety of digital and precision tools can be applied in an integrated way on their farms to best support crop management decisions throughout the year.
The Digital Technology Farm (DTF) network is putting the ‘field of the future’ into practice alongside standard ‘field of today’ regimes in a wide range of commercial settings.
This allows us to explore tools identified as particularly promising by the continual horizon scanning of our R&D team’s Innovation Technology Group; to establish the extent to which they can really deliver in commercial practice; and to develop and integrate them in ways which better meet day-to-day farming needs.
We and our DTF partners want to find out how key data-driven technologies can best be included within particular agronomic strategies for the greatest returns. And, like all our agronomy development research, we want to quantify the extra value they offer with hard facts rather than just exciting promises.
Working with growers across the country, we have identified a number of areas where digital technologies offer the greatest potential. These include:
- Saving costs through better targeted inputs
- Identifying agronomy issues earlier than by eye
- Taking more human error out of the equation
- Having better tools to support decision-making
- Reducing time spent managing field operations
- Improving performance from every part of the field
- Justifying agronomic decisions with solid evidence
- Providing reliable proof of environmental improvement gains.
Our initial Digital Technology Farm network extends to four sites – Revesby Estate near Boston in Lincolnshire, Brotherton Farms near Montrose in Scotland, Throws Farm near Great Dunmow in Essex, and Hayle Farm near Tunbridge Wells in Kent.
At Revesby our current trials work involves 40ha of winter wheat in a near zero-tillage regime while at Brotherton the project involves 13ha of winter oilseed rape and 26ha of spring barley under a more traditional cultivation system. Being a LEAF Innovation Centre, our work at Throws Farm has more of an environmental slant alongside a 10ha field of spring linseed. An apple orchard is our prime test-bed at Hayle.
In each case, half the cropped area is being managed with a variety of digital technologies and the other alongside it to the farms’ standard practice to provide the best possible comparison.
All the DTFs have soils scanned and mapped into management zones; profit from the most up-to-date Rhiza satellite imagery, weather data, yield recording and other Contour platform services; and, alongside their agronomists, are supported by local digital specialists as well as members of our R&D team.
We will be adding extra locations to this core over the coming months and years to give the best possible geographic as well as cropping system coverage, including high value vegetable crops.
Our current DTF programme is focussed around four main areas of digital technology – PlentySense N blades, Skippy Scout automatic drone flight software and analytics, Apps-for-Agri FieldMate sensors linked to the SmartFarm app, and SoilTech soil monitoring.
By continually measuring nitrate levels in the soil solution at 10cm, 20cm and 40cm depths, we are looking to the PlentySense N blades for an accurate season-long assessment of immediately available crop nitrogen. Understanding how much nitrate is available where in the soil profile in relation to crop rooting, growth and soil type throughout the season offers us the opportunity to prioritise fields for the most-timely fertilisation. It also enables us to better plan the use of different nitrogen sources (or inhibitors where required), enabling a greater understanding of nitrogen use efficiency (NUE).
Alongside this we are using the Skippy Scout system as another more granular data layer that further enhances the use of existing Rhiza satellite imagery. With it we are monitoring crop variability, growth stages and crop-specific GAIs as the basis for improving the accuracy of nitrogen fertilisation. At the same time, we are exploring its value in informing and validating IPM decision-making based on weed, pest and disease pressures as well as its possible role in measuring OSR flowering and tracking pod development, ripening and senescence to aid spray timing decisions.
The Apps-for-Agri FieldMate sensors we are testing measure a range of key components of both field and in-crop climate – including air and soil temperatures, rainfall and humidity. Linked to local weather forecasting and risk models for up to 150 diseases in the SmartFarm app, they offer the opportunity to improve fungicide use and timing. Again, we want to see whether they provide economic and environmental benefits over current agronomic practice.
The same applies to the SoilTech wireless sensors we are employing for the extra value they may be able to give alongside the N blades in monitoring soil moisture, temperature and humidity.
On the environmental side we are looking at particular bio-acoustic sensors to detect and measure pollinators and bird species, while our apple orchard work includes automatic coddling moth identification traps.
Our initial R&D investigations suggest all these tools offer value in one or more areas of crop management. The impact of this in everyday farming practice is what our Agrii DTF infrastructure is designed to establish. Alongside this we want to iron out any possible glitches as they are moved from carefully controlled test conditions into broad-acre use and combine them into functional packages that are easy to manage.
Our aim is to put digital technologies through the same sort of rigorous development testing we have long done with varieties and other crop inputs. That way our growers and agronomists can employ them where they will do most good with confidence and, every bit as importantly, without having to juggle a whole host of different apps that tell them different things and don’t necessarily work well with one another.
It’s early days yet, but we’ve learnt a lot even before our first DTF trial harvest. For instance, the serious vulnerability of some field sensor wiring to rabbit damage was identified early on in the season and has already been ‘designed-out’ by the manufacturer. We have also established a great opportunity for two of the systems to complement each other in delivering the best decision-support and brought their makers together to deliver much improved interoperability.
As we’ve always done with our Technology Centres and iFarms, we will be making the results of our Digital Technology Farm trials available to growers across the country through regular reports as well as in meetings and open days from this summer.
Bespoke R&D drone system shows great commercial potential
A drone-mounted spectrometry system developed by Agrii to provide its R&D programme with valuable extra plot analyses during the growing season is being extended into a crop monitoring tool with particular broad-acre promise.
The system brings together off-the-shelf hardware with advanced processing software and a clever artificial intelligence program. Overlaying several thousand images, it can be ‘trained’ to identify whatever aspect of the crop is to be monitored – such as crop size, ripeness, weed levels or gaps between plants.
Last autumn, the system was successfully used to eliminate the need to manually count and assess cabbage plants in a 0.16ha trial plot.
It revealed a population of 5241 cabbages from the 5460 planted – establishing a plant loss of 4%. Of greater value was the system’s ability to analyse head size cabbage-by-cabbage across the crop, revealing the proportion of the crop meeting market specification and any areas needing to be left to grow on to do so.
Ground-truthing on foot revealed only a very small margin of error in this sizing, showing the immense potential of the system to inform harvest scheduling and yield forecasting with significant economies of time.
Having successfully proved the concept, the drone system is currently being employed to count weeds and plants in an Agrii sugar beet herbicide trial. It is also being developed and tested in a variety of agronomic applications on commercial farms for delivery by the company’s rapidly growing team of trained drone operators.