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How To Start Drilling For £8K

Clive Bailye’s seed drill of choice is his 6m John Deere 750A , which has been used exclusively for 3-4 seasons. Last year, with an increased acreage, the founder and publisher of this Direct Driller magazine thought a second seed drill was necessary. Having just the one machine was a risk and in a difficult season would mean drilling was delayed. He looked around and found a good condition Horsch CO6 tine drill advertised in Germany.

Words and pictures by Mike Donovan

After delivery he rebuilt the coulters to a narrow profile so as to reduce soil disturbance. He says the tine drill is very useful driling after straw crops such as osr and also through the straw on second crop cereals.

Buying the drill from a German farmer was not particularly complicated, and provided him with a higher spec machine than Horsh sell in the UK. The seed dart tyres are much wider, and the machine is fitted with blockage monitors as well as full width front packers and also a liquid fert application system.

A sheaf of photos were taken, and Clive then asked for some of specific parts to show wear. The deal was done at under £5,000 which Clive says is the market value of these machines which are too large for small farmers to buy. Original owners like to buy new and sell when the machine is still in good condition.

Narrow tines with wear tiles

@Clive knew he wanted to make changes, substituting the Horsch tines and coulters for something far narrower, and has ended up getting his own design of tine made, which has a wear tile made from Ferobide, far harder than tungsten. The drill is on the farm primarily for osr and 2nd crop cereals drilled into chopped straw and the 25cm spacing is okay for these crops.

Comments on Clive’s on-line forum, TFF, said the drill many not be so good with beans, as the slot is a mere 12mm wide. And in barley the spacing may well be too wide as it needs to be thick. Clive points out that the seed pipe can actually be a bit wider than 12mm as it is in the shadow of the point. It would be good to have the option of using it for beans.

Above left: The cheap CO6 is being calibrated ready for its first outing

Above right: The adapted Horsch is being filled by the home built drill logistics trailer with seed and liquid starter fert.

Getting around the German instructions

The Horsch came, of course, with a control box and instructions in German. More on-line discussion revealed that English instructions were available on the Horsch website, and another explained that Horsch was sourcing some of these parts from Agton in Canada anyway. Zealman from New Zealand explained that the button marked with callipers should be held down for around 5 seconds. The menu is where you adjust the tramline sequence, valve layout and row numbers.

Ball hitch is a continental standard and provides a positive connection between tractor and drill

The Stocks Wizard has a rotor modified for Avadex which otherwise leaks everywhere

A Stocks Wizard is on the back of the drill and used for Avadex. Here again the knowledge of actual farmers is helpful. Alistair Nelson warned that the rotor and the surrounding shroud need to be changed, and he got good advice “from Rick at Stocks”. Clive has the same setup on the 750A and says that the Avadex leaks everywhere unless the modification is made. The drill was acquired and modified in 2016 and the results have been excellent.

The machine went through the residue without many problems and having the second drill has meant more timely planting. Clive has shown that moving into No-Till is not the expensive exercise so many farmers think it might be. The total cost, after modifications which included replacing all tines and coulters, was under £8,000.

Author Mike Donovan writes: we have featured a number of home made direct drills in @Practical Farm Ideas, and are always interested in seeing more. Please contact mike editor@farmideas.co.uk or 07778877514.
Issue 29 Contents
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Inside this issue:
Step or Incremental Change: A Strategic Decision

When many people think about technology in farming, they envisage the big step changes such as the complete move from manual picking
to robotic picking. Or big tractors to little robots. And these changes have happened before in farming. But more often, technological change has been incremental, giving a small benefit over previous actions.

Understanding the difference between step change and incremental change is a lot like knowing when to use a big tractor versus when to take a more careful, hands-on approach. A step change is like bringing out the big tractor, making a big impact, and able to transform things fast. On the other hand, incremental change is like walking the fields and tending to the crops by hand—slow, steady, and deliberate, leading to gradual but steady progress over time. Both have their place on the farm, depending on what’s needed to get the best results.

But let’s face it we all love big tractors!

You as farmers are confronted with a choice, a strategic crossroads that can significantly influence the direction and ultimate profitability of your farms: should you embrace a radical rethinking, known as a step change, or choose the measured journey of progressive evolution, the path of incremental change?

When you think of technology on your farm, are you thinking big or incremental. A step change often requires a comprehensive rethinking of farming processes and commitment to whole new machinery. Even getting the timing right of such a big change is a massive decision. But this sort of decision has the power to change a business overnight, ignite new feeling and renew business growth. With these big rewards, step change carries inherent risks as well.

How will staff react to the change, how stable and reliable is the new technology? Lots of things to consider. In contrast, incremental change is a journey of progressive evolution, promoting the process of continuous improvement. This approach excels in stable environments where change is slow and where predictability is critical.

For farms constrained by limited resources, incremental change offers a path to controlled growth. It also acts as a safety net, offering a cautious progression when the risks associated with drastic changes loom large. Crucially, incremental change allows a farm to evolve while preserving its core values and staff culture. That said, changing slowly may be too slow if others around you are moving faster.

The agricultural landscape does change around you and farmers need to make sure they aren’t left behind. A balance is required and knowing when you can take small steps and when bigger ones are needed is complicated. And so, the choice between a dramatic decision —step change, and a graceful slide—incremental change, isn’t a binary decision. You are going to need to make a some big changes and lots of little steps. Many of these will be dictated by the latest technology available and we discuss many of these in this magazine. From choosing a different wheat to grow next year, though to adding a vertical farming container to your farm.

There are now so many ways a farm can change what it grows, with some of these changes being a radical shift based on the history of what you have grown. But you have the land, the power and the resources (like this magazine) to choose what decisions suit you (and your family). Farms have lots more options than many businesses as they have space.

That should be seen as a good thing, even if it complicates your decision-making process. Have a read of the rest of this magazine and see what makes you think of taking some big steps on your farm and what will help you make those smaller incremental changes. While remembering, the ideal strategy harmonises the radical transformation of step change with the steady progression of incremental change. Get this right and your farming will thrive and you will also learn a lot along the way.
Can Tech save Carbon from a crisis?

Tom Allen-Stevens travels forward to 2030 and looks for the farmers who would emerge strengthened if the bubble burst on the carbon market.

Here in 2030, it’s very easy to claim the benefit of hindsight. But it’s fair to say few could have foreseen the depth of the scars that would lash the farming landscape when the carbon bubble f inally burst. In the UK, this wasn’t helped by the disastrous and now notorious family farm tax the incoming Labour government introduced in its first budget, back in 2024. As land rapidly changed hands, its value as a carbon sink was overplayed by unscrupulous traders, keen to sucker in a new generation of hapless landowners.

The deregulation brought in by the Trump administration in the US fuelled worldwide growth in carbon markets that many economists warned was dangerously unstable. Following market collapse, the question many in the food industry are now asking is whether the measures brought in by the new Lib/Lab coalition will stem the current meteoric growth in food prices. It’s probably too late for family farming businesses to come back into land ownership and make a credible difference to food security, following its dive to a reported 40%.

The NFU has also dismissed the proposed food security capital fund the government is intending to pour billions into – this won’t be incentive enough for new landowners to rebuild the farming infrastructure lost over the past five years, they say. But the carbon market has now stabilised in the US, thanks largely to measures the new president brought in shortly after she took office. So could confidence in carbon tempt landowners to make the investment needed for farmers to grow the nation’s food on so much of the UK’s land that’s just been left to deteriorate? There is a glimmer of hope.

One sector of the carbon market that remains rock-solid is where it’s built on the new Regenerative Carbon Standard. This came about because scientists worked directly with farmers to develop on farm new technologies in measuring and understanding the soil microbiome. And that’s where the benefit of hindsight comes in. If you have retained your 2024 copies of Tech Farmer, you can leaf through the pages of those early editions and remind yourself of the tech you saw first, and that’s now underpinning the standards of more sustainable farming systems. It was why we featured Rachel and Jacob Holmes back in November 2024.

At a time when there was precious little scientific measurement of practices claimed to build soil health, they were determined to bring this into play across A more scientific understanding of the soil microbiome could be the key to a rock-solid carbon market. their farm on the Isle of Wight (see Issue #31 p41). Photosynthetic promoters are another example (see p6). Working with scientists, farmers trialling those early, pre-commercial products developed an understanding of their crops’ biosynthesic pathways. It’s this knowledge that now forms the backbone of cropping solutions for carbon capture that can be reliably measured and consistently improved.

Then there’s the World AgriTech Innovation Summit (p26), the biennial event that takes place in San Francisco and London, now recognised as the stimulus for pioneering farmers on both sides of the Atlantic to take on new tech. Few growers in 2030 would trust anything other than RNA diagnostics for a truly accurate and measurable picture of crop health. This was first presented at WATIS San Francisco in 2024. Perhaps the most promising tech for sustainable and reliable soil carbon capture is now coming from precisionbred crops, however. Cast your mind back to November 2024 and the launch of #PROBITYPledge, the campaign that encouraged farmers to find out about this new technology and help shape how it should be introduced on farm (p39).

These are among the technologies we now consider as fundamental to delivering a robust and sustainable agriculture. But five years ago, in 2024, they were seen as fairly remote, with the opportunities they held unclear. They would never have made it into the field had it not been for pioneering farmers who diligently undertook the trials to acquire the knowledge the entire industry now relies on. So what were you testing in your fields back in 2024, and what will you glean from the pages that follow in this issue that could stave off a catastrophic crisis in five years’ time? Happy hunting.

Tom Allen-Stevens farms 170ha in Oxfordshire and leads the British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN).
Harnessing the power of the sun

Farming in a greener way generally involves increasing efficiencies in pursuit of the goal for crops to produce more from less. Tech Farmer explores some novel technologies that use energy from the sun to enhance crop production.

Written by Lucy de la Pasture

About 93 million miles away the sun powers all of life on Earth, providing solar energy for plants to capture and turn to chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis. And it’s this solar energy that’s being harnessed to develop products that can help crops be more efficient in a surprising number of ways.

Photosynthesis is naturally an inefficient process, with plants only able to use about 1% of the solar energy available to them. That’s because plants evolved to harness the sun’s energy for the sole purpose of supporting growth sufficient to produce seeds, thus ensuring continued survival of the species. But humans ask much more of plants as they push the boundaries of food production, farming at scale, and despite the tremendous advances in crop production, a biological limit to yield remains because of a plant’s natural ability – or inability – to process light.

But what if the photosynthetic process could be more efficient, remove more carbon from the atmosphere and increase crop yields without using more fertiliser? This is exactly what ex-Bristol University researchers Dr David Benito and Dr Imke Sittel set out to achieve and they’ve been so successful in their quest that they founded Glaia in 2019 to commercialise a photosynthetic promoter.

The company is licensed to use the technology in biostimulant products to help increase crop yields in a sustainable way. The first product of this kind, Fragaria, has just been launched in the UK and Netherlands for use in strawberries, with availability in Spain and the US soon to follow.

“If we could increase the efficiency of photosynthesis to 2%, we could double the yield of crops. But we’re not there yet,” explains David.

Drawing inspiration from the carbon-based nanomaterials found in nature, the photosynthetic promoter uses a nanocarbon material derived from sugar. These sugar dots open up the photosynthetic process inside plant cells so they can take in more solar energy and convert it into more biomass. Essentially, it fine tunes nature’s engine, giving plants the potential to increase efficiency at a molecular level.

So how does this happen? David explains that plants capture energy from sunlight in the leaf, causing electrons in the chlorophyll to become ‘excited’. “It’s this energy stored in the chlorophyll that’s used to split water and generate oxygen. Additionally, electrons are transported down the photosynthetic chain and incorporated into high energy molecules that are then used with CO₂ and nutrients to form carbohydrates.

“But the biological processes involved in transporting those electrons can’t cope with all the available energy, so the plant uses mechanisms to protect itself against light. What it does in very simplified terms is to stop photosynthesis when the light is very intense,” he explains.

A feedback loop switches the process back on when light intensity falls and it’s this ‘on/off’ switch that contributes to the inefficiency of photosynthesis, adds David.

“Our photosynthetic promoter allows plants to process more of that energy because it facilitates electron transport, enabling plants to capture more solar energy and transform it into chemical energy. And because less damaging, unused energy is left in the leaf, the plant doesn’t have to switch off photosynthesis for so long and there’s an overall improvement in photosynthetic efficiency.”

Although the technology hasn’t yet improved photosynthetic efficiency enough to double the yield of crops, trials are producing a very respectable 20% yield increase with no additional nitrogen inputs, effectively producing more food without increasing CO₂ emissions, he says.

“We saw an opportunity for this technology to change the way we produce food in the sense that it can help reduce the climate impact of agriculture. Its mode of action improves the photosynthetic efficiency of plants by allowing them to utilise more sunlight, capture CO₂ and increase yields sustainably because no extra nitrogen is required.

“By applying the Glaia technology, there’s an increase in yield and that’s because it improves nutrient use efficiency as well. It translates to an overall reduction in CO₂ emissions per tonne of produce by at least 15%,” he claims.

The company aims to bring its biostimulant technology to all crops, with the biggest impact on CO₂ emissions possible in arable crops, highlights David. Trials in winter wheat are underway and earlier work has already shown average yield increases of 18%, underlining its potential in broadacre crops.

“Because there’s a more limited opportunity to apply a photosynthetic promoter in wheat than in strawberries, we’re developing an application protocol that won’t involve an extra pass for growers,” he adds.

Another biostimulant technology with solar radiation at its heart is being developed by Hertfordshire-based SugaROx. The company was spun out of Rothamsted Research and Oxford University in 2021, bringing together the knowledge gained by researchers to improve sucrose allocation in crops, thereby increasing yield.

T6P marries up with innate plant chemistry, causing T6P levels to spike and supercharging the grain fill process, explains Dr Cara Griffiths.

The technology is patented and licensed and will be the only authentic trehalose-6-phosphate (T6P) synthase technology available to growers, born out of the decade of research undertaken to develop it, explains Dr Cara Griffiths, co-founder and chief technology officer of SugaROx.

T6P is a signalling molecule and an intermediary of the trehalose biosynthesis pathway, in which endogenous levels are synthesised to match sucrose content. “You can think of T6P as a sucrose fuel gauge and it’s a mechanism that’s present in all plants to regulate sucrose use and allocation.”

It does this by interacting with an enzyme called SnRK1, explains Cara. “It’s a major sucrose utilisation enzyme, and it has two kinds of modes – feast and famine. This is where T6P comes in; it can switch the plant from famine into feast mode by telling the plant that there’s lots of sugar around so that it can transport it to where it’s needed and store more sucrose in its tissues.”

The discovery of the role of the signalling molecule highlighted the potential for manipulating the T6P mechanism for crop improvement purposes.

“Our aim was to find a way of increasing T6P and carbon allocation in a non-genetically modified way. To achieve this, we had to create a novel version of T6P,” she comments.

The products SugaROx is developing are a modified version of T6P, with a chemical group added to the molecule. “Essentially, it’s a caged T6P compound which acts as a T6P delivery system,” explains Cara.

This was needed as in unmodified form, T6P can’t be taken up by plants when applied as a foliar spray, she adds. “T6P itself is very polar, so once sprayed onto a leaf it will just sit on the leaf surface rather be taken up by the plant. The chemical addition that we’ve added changes the charge of the molecule, helping the uptake of T6P within the plant.”

And this is where solar energy has an important role. “Sunlight is needed to cleave this group off the modified T6P, which was added to aid its transport. The T6P is then released into the plant where it’s biologically active.”

The SugaROx technology is particularly suited for crops with a sink-based yield, such as wheat where Cara describes it as “a magnet for sugars and nutrients”. By applying during grain development, the applied T6P marries up with innate plant chemistry, causing T6P levels to spike and supercharging the grain fill process.

Dr Imke Sittel and Dr David Benito are commercialising a photosynthetic promoter to help plants process more light into sugars.

“It switches on the SnRK1 enzyme which pulls everything that supports good yield production into the ears of the plants, producing yield increases of up to 22% in the field,” she claims.

The interaction of T6P and SnRK1 affects a number of plant pathways, including sucrose use and allocation, starch conversion and storage, as well as a general nutrient uplift into the area, explains Cara.

“Essentially, T6P is signalling to the plant that there’s lots of nutrition around and it should turn on all of its processes to do with growth and resource allocation. We’re just enhancing processes the plant already uses itself.”

The use of solar energy isn’t limited to influencing photosynthesis and sugar metabolism, it can actually initiate a process that simultaneously removes pollutants and greenhouse gases from the air while also fertilising the crop.

Photocatalysts such as titanium dioxide have long been known for their powers of detoxification but can only absorb light in the ultraviolet spectrum. This would limit their efficiency as an application to UK crops.

And it’s this problem that Crop Intellect has solved by processing titanium oxide in a way that makes it able to function as a photocatalyst under normal daylight conditions. The technology is available as R-Leaf, a sprayable suspension concentrate which acts as an alternative source of nitrogen and can replace 25% of the total nitrogen applied, according to the company’s trials data.

The science behind sucrose levels and allocation, Source: SugaROx

“This is the first time that photocatalysis has been used in agriculture as a way to generate nitrates, but the story does not stop there,” says Alvaro Montero Bockos, Crop Intellect’s chief operating officer and sustainability lead.

“While the conversion of NOx air pollutants into nitrates produces an input to support crop growth and reduce fertiliser usage, R-Leaf brings a key difference to traditional fertilisers through its capacity to remove N₂O greenhouse gas at the same time.”

The effectiveness of the photocatalyst used in R-Leaf has also been verified by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University. Their work has shown the R-Leaf material is 10 times more effective in photocatalysis, both under UV light and normal daylight, compared with the unprocessed material. The results confirm that under daylight the product works close to that of the performance of titanium dioxide under UV light.

R-Leaf has been six years in development and is already on the market, with limited quantities available in the UK and Europe since 2022. This year up to 60,000 litres is scheduled for production and looks set to grow as distribution also begins in the United States

According to Alvaro, the technology is already firmly embedded in some agricultural supply chains because of its unique sustainability credentials.

“Instead of being a source of nitrous oxide, as all synthetic nitrogen-based fertilisers can be, R-Leaf converts these and pollutant NOx gases from the air into plant fertiliser, with an overall environmental impact of 5.4 t CO₂e removed per year,” says Alvaro.

The company’s claim has been verified by the Climate Impact Forecast Tool and relates to the recommended two applications of R-Leaf at 1 l/ha and 25% nitrogen reduction.

So how does it work? “When R-Leaf is sprayed onto the crop, the photocatalysts it contains are charged with daylight. Electrons and hydrogen ions are produced which react with oxygen and water from the air to form powerful oxidising agents which break NOx down into nitrate and water,” he explains.

When R-Leaf is sprayed onto the crop, the photocatalysts it contains are charged with daylight. Electrons and hydrogen ions are produced which react with oxygen and water from the air to form powerful oxidising agents which break NOx down into nitrate and water.

The nitrate produced in this reaction solubilises on the leaf, enabling foliar uptake by the crop. Because the photocatalyst is persistent on the leaf, lasting around six weeks, plant growth is supported by a slow daily release of nitrate.

“During the same process, when interacting with N₂O gases, R-Leaf breaks it down into inert nitrogen and oxygen gases, effectively removing a GHG from the air. This brings additional sustainability benefits by reducing the overall carbon footprint.”

This removal has been confirmed by Ostrava University which showed a daily 10% removal capacity in the laboratory under simulated outdoor conditions. “Pollution is transformed into a positive. We have seen in the past three years of trials that we are able to generate 50-100KgN/ha and we have data that shows R-Leaf supports plant growth in a better manner than current fertilisers,” he adds.

Photocatalysis experts at Imperial College London have also quantified the amount of nitrate produced by R-Leaf under a system that simulates conditions in the field. They showed that R-Leaf provided the equivalent of 90kgN/ha over three months, explains Alvaro.

Cutting back on nitrogen from the bag may require a leap of faith for some farmers but Alvaro is confident the agronomic benefits from R-Leaf application add up. “Normally our recommendation is a 25% reduction in synthetic fertiliser when using R-Leaf and we consistently see an increase in yield of 5-10%,” he says.

The novel product is tank-mixable and the company recommends applying with T1 and T2 fungicide applications so that no extra sprayer passes are required.

The product has been trialled in a number of other crops including potatoes, carrots, peas, brassicas, and grassland with good results, the company claims. Interestingly, peas have also shown a yield response to R-Leaf application. It’s a surprising finding given the leguminous crop is often adversely affected by nitrogen application which reduces its nitrogen fixation and makes it more susceptible to disease. In three years of trials in the crop, yield responses of up to 20% have been obtained, according to Alvaro.

R-Leaf peas trial – nitrate. The additional nitrogen available to the pea crop after R-Leaf application seems to have a beneficial effect on growth and yield.

Crop Intellect has just been awarded funding from Innovate UK for a project which will investigate the use of R-Leaf with endophyte products to further boost the sustainability of growing arable crops by potentially halving nitrogen inputs.

The project consortium is led by Crop Intellect and includes Barworth Research, University of Lincoln, CHAP, The Allerton Project, and Dyson Farming Research.

Multi-location field trials hosted at Dyson Farming will test how R-Leaf can be used with endophyte prototypes to combine their nitrogen-fixing benefits. The trials aim to reduce an estimated 50% of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser applied to wheat under standard farming practice.

Richard Meredith, head of Dyson Farming Research, adds: “We see large potential in how this can help reduce farm input costs while improving soil health through reduced synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use. It will contribute directly towards net zero emission targets in agriculture and impact positively across the entire agri-food supply chain, from farm to retailers and end consumers.”

And that’s the exciting potential of agricultural innovations such as these, believes Alvaro. “Potentially R-Leaf could be a simple solution to help limit farming’s GHG emissions – every leaf could be an R-Leaf.”
A Revolution in Bio-Positive Agriculture

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, farmers and agricultural professionals are always looking for innovative solutions that build better soil resilience and improve crop health whilst striving to lower their fertiliser inputs and their environmental impact. ActiV8-Bio, a unique biological product designed by SFS, is one solution that sparks curiosity and gains significant traction with a revolutionary approach to revitalising soil and boosting crop growth. But… before we get on to that, let’s delve deeper into what drives some of these decisions and promotes poorer growing conditions.

A ruler’s strength typically comes from the power of its subjects, so, if yield is king, yield is subject to this and subject to that.

Take a plant, for starters; as a seed, it gets thrust down into the soil’s hostile environment, fending for itself and scavenging for essential elements, all with one aim, to reach upwards and get its solar panels out of the ground quickly so that it can begin to make its food and support itself via photosynthesis. Sounds easy, right? After all, it’s a natural process; plants will do it anyway.

When you’re a young seed, the soil is not a nice place to be; everything down there wants to support itself first before lending its new neighbour a helping hand. Our new inhabitant has limited resources, so to bolster its dwindling reserves, it is keen to make new friends (quickly). Still, with all good relationships, things need to be mutually beneficial, which can be a bit of a sticking point for this fledgling seed; it ends up giving away some of its supplies to barter and attract the correct type of supportive partner, and unfortunately, the simple act of spending to survive, negatively impacts our seeds performance, but what choice does it have?

How about if there wasn’t such a panic to go upwards, and instead, the young seedling had the available resources to leisurely extend its rooting further, optimising its nutrient cycling capacity first, rather than desperately scrabbling for the surface? And what if the soil environment already contained billions of biological helpers supporting the seed and stimulating better soil health? Imagine building hardier growth with a plant that’s now less susceptible to stresses, insect and pathogen attacks.

Innovative biological starter products are more than fertilisers. They provide both soil and plant nutrition while reinforcing the soil microbial workforce. This departure from conventional fertilisers offers a more holistic and sustainable approach to agricultural production, inspiring a sense of responsibility and environmental commitment.

A blend of carefully selected ingredients that work synergistically to improve soil health and promote plant growth must be at their core. These elements should include humic and fulvic acids – crucial for enhancing soil structure and increasing aeration and water retention. These acids also play a vital role in chelating essential minerals, making them more accessible to plants.

In addition to humic and fulvic acids, ActiV8-Bio is enriched with a diverse range of beneficial micro-organisms, including
Phosphate fixers, Nitrogen fixers, plant protectors, and soil pathogen combatants. These micro-organisms work tirelessly to improve soil quality, enhance nutrient uptake, and safeguard plants from diseases and pests.

Trace elements may only be needed in tiny amounts, but this doesn’t make them any less critical to crop productivity, which can suffer when many of these elements are deficient in soils. For example, Zinc, Boron, and Manganese are all vital for early growth and development, and by providing a readily available source of these elements, growers can effectively address nutrient deficiencies and optimise plant health.

It all sounds good, but how does it work? Well, by establishing a symbiotic relationship between the soil and the plants, micro-organisms can do what they do best, and that means that both parties are kept happy: The plant gets an available version of the element it needs, like calling in a food delivery driver – Our driver (microbe) gets paid in sugars from the plant exudates.

Still, it goes further…those microbes will defend their territory and meal ticket, leading to a healthier root zone with fewer pathogenic organisms where a plant can prosper better. An excellent biological product will contain billions of these helpful microbes. Still, an exceptional one will go that one step further and provide the biological army with food, so that it doesn’t need to rob soil resources and can get to work immediately.

Imagine you’ve planted your seeds, and they’re starting to grow; but you’re worried about pests and diseases that could harm your crops. But what can a biological product do to protect them? One way is to introduce beneficial micro-organisms to your soil. These tiny creatures can help your plants grow stronger and healthier.

One such beneficial micro-organism is Bacillus Amyloliquefaciens. I like to call this one the guard dog: This bacterium can recycle nutrients in the soil, making them more available for your plants to use. It can also create a protective layer around plant roots, shielding them from harmful pathogens. It produces substances that can kill harmful bacteria and fungi. By doing all these things, Bacillus Amyloliquefaciens can help your plants grow bigger and stronger and improve soil quality.

The opposing argument would suggest that using N, P, K, S, and Mg fertilisers as a starter will do the same job; the plants would grow, and the soil would be fine. I am not suggesting that fertiliser is not required, but available nutrition is, and many fertilisers are inefficient – with losses expected, not only wasting money but also increasing the risk of environmental contamination.

Biological starters such as ActiV8-Bio provide accessible nutrients in a form a plant can readily use without oversupplying or forcing feed, creating a more harmonious ecosystem.

Whether you adopt it now or sometime in the not-too-distant future, biological products that offer a sustainable and effective solution for modern agriculture are the way forward. By enhancing soil health, improving crop growth, and reducing the reliance on chemical inputs, growers can improve profitability and contribute to a more bio-positive, sustainable system. If you want to know more about biological products supporting today’s plant and tomorrow’s soil, contact us at SFS.
Living up to the SFI and its actions

The SFI offers financial payments to those who adopt variable rate applications, but demonstrating compliance is more than a tick-box exercise, explains Rhiza product manager Ben Foster

The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) has much to offer growers from payments for environmental actions, to incentives that improve sustainability, productivity and, importantly, business resilience.

With 102 actions available across a multitude of activities, the SFI has something for every farm and with a defined payment schedule, participants can plan with confidence.

A core pillar of the SFI is the module on soils and the actions to help you ‘increase the long-term health, productivity and resilience of your soil’. Who could object to that?

The complementary nature of the three soil actions – SAM1, SAM2 and SAM3 – broadly support the same objective but offer different levels of participation depending on the interest of the land manager. The actions for nutrient management – NUM1, NUM2 and NUM3 – have similar objectives but with a specific focus on ‘increasing nutrient management knowledge, supporting more efficient use of nutrients and encouraging more effective use of organic sources of nutrition’. Again, who could object?

At its core, the SFI offers payment for actions that many consider good farming practice, such as maintaining desirable landscape features or demonstrating adherence to an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) plan. There are some that the land manager can complete themselves and there are others, such as the soil and nutrient management actions, which need to be demonstrated in the form of a plan produced by a suitably qualified person, such as FACTS registered adviser. Fortunately, Agrii’s team of FACTS-qualified crop input specialists and agronomists are trained in the finer details, so are well-placed to help.

Soil acidity

Central to both the soil and nutrient management actions is the requirement to maintain the long-term health of the soil and support the wider environment such as surface water and air quality. Although not a specific action, soil acidity (pH) and its role in supporting a functioning soil is widely recognised through these modules.

After a difficult season, many soils are likely to need some remedial action. Where soils experienced excessive water logging, compaction is likely to be the most obvious damage, with those transitioning to reduced tillage systems likely to be the most affected. Waterlogging can also adversely affect soil acidity. Addressing both compaction and soil pH is a key part of any soil remediation and should feature in a soil management plan.

Analysis of soil sample data reveals that the health of our soils has been declining for many years. Data from the 2023 British Survey of Fertiliser Practice supports this observation. Of the farms surveyed, only about one in 20 fields are limed each year. This is insufficient for pH values to be maintained in the desired range. Soil acidity is only one measure of a soil’s ability to function properly, but it is a useful proxy for overall soil health. The average pH value of UK soils has dropped by more than 0.4 pH units over two decades (see Figure 1). If the effect of high pH brash or calcareous soils were stripped out, the decline would be even greater – from an optimal 6.7 to a sub-optimal 6.3. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning an increase of one unit, from 7 to 8, for example, means the soil is 10 times more alkaline. A decrease from 7 to 5 means the soil is 100 times more acidic.

Figure 1: The average pH of UK soils has fallen below the optimal score of 6.5

The acidity of our soils needs to be addressed. As values fall closer to 6, essential nutrients such as phosphorous and calcium and micro-nutrients such as magnesium and molybdenum are rendered increasingly unavailable to the growing crop – see Figure 2.

Figure 2: The influence of soil pH on nutrient availability

Soil pH also has an influence on nutrient utilisation, applied as either organic manures and wastes or as mineral fertilisers – see Table 1.

Table 1: The impact of soil pH on NPK utilisation

Soil pH N P₂O₅ K₂O
4.5 30% 23% 33%
5.0 53% 34% 52%
5.5 77% 48% 77%
6.0 89% 52% 100%
Optimum 100% 100% 100%

The effect of acidic soils, however, extends beyond nutrient availability. A requirement of a soil management plan for loamy soils is to ‘encourage earthworms’ and for clay soils to ‘maintain earthworm activity and water infiltration’.

As a soil becomes acidic, earthworm numbers fall, and survival is unlikely below 4.5. The ability of micro-organisms to break down organic matter and convert nutrients into plant available forms is directly influenced by pH. Failure to correct soil acidity could be seen as a breach of the actions outlined in a soil management plan.

The Rhiza Lime Planner

Restoring soil pH is a straightforward task. The SFI pays for soil organic matter testing as part of a soil management plan. Adding a basic nutrient analysis (P, K, Mg pH) is a relatively low-cost addition, and is also a requirement for Nutrient Management Planning, so most land managers will have up-to-date data on the status of their soils. This data can be imported easily into Rhiza’s Contour platform to give a digital record, visualise nutrient maps and use the data in Rhiza’s suite of planning tools, such as the new Lime Planner tool.

Figure 3: Soil pH values can be displayed as a list and colour-coded map in Rhiza Lime Planner

Once the soil sampling data has been uploaded to the Lime Planner module, the user can set a target pH value to create a job sheet report and an application file (in shapefile format) for either variable rate or flat-rate application. This can then be sent to the machinery controller.

Satisfying the PRF1 requirement

The use of data from soil analysis performed in previous seasons is sufficient for variable rate lime and P and K application because the pH value and soil indices won’t change significantly during the season. This is not the case for variable rate nitrogen.

Nitrogen requirement will depend on the crop situation and available soil reserves coming out of the winter. Therefore the PFR1 action requires that where remote sensing is used to calculate the nitrogen requirement it is carried out no more than 14 days before application.

The above-average rain and heavy cloud cover that marred spring 2024 meant those relying on optical imagery derived from the Sentinel-2 satellites struggled to secure images of sufficient value to meet the PRF1 action. Roughly 80% of the imagery produced was rejected.

ClearSky

The only source of guaranteed cloud-free imagery able to meet the requirements of the SRF1 action is from ClearSky. It delivers accuracy through full-spectrum optical and infrared imagery, including NDVI and GCVI from synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) – see Figure 4. It removes the need for a clean line of sight as is the case with imagery from Sentinel-2 satellites.

Figure 4: A ClearSky image showing NDVI values needed to support a variable rate application file

This innovation means that farmers using ClearSky are guaranteed to receive an image showing them how their crop is developing every six days, whatever the weather because SAR data is not incumbered by cloud.

Unlike other ‘cloud-free’ derivatives, ClearSky does not rely on intermittent clear optical imagery to calibrate predicted changes. This enables a greater degree of confidence in the data supplied to customers.

Analysis by Agrii on 900,000ha revealed that the Sentinel-2 system produced, on average, roughly 13.3 clear images per farm in 2023. Using the ClearSky platform increased this to 60.8. This number is improved further if the cloud-free images captured by Sentinel-2 are included.

The adoption of technology that improves the performance and resilience of agriculture is an objective of the SFI. Being able to demonstrate adherence with its actions is more than a tick-box exercise. Participants are expected to demonstrate that they are fulfilling the actions on demand. In some cases, this means producing a report while in others it means producing the actual data employed in the fulfilment of the task. ClearSky ensures that variable rate applications are consistent with crop requirements while making it easy to demonstrate compliance with the PRF1 action.

PRF1: What you must do to get paid and how to do it

PRF1 is the action for the variable rate application (VRA) of nutrients. It is a three-year agreement for which the recipient will receive £27/ha/year. There are specific eligibility criteria, mainly relating to land type, but to comply, all major nutrients (N, P, K and Mg) must be applied using VRA equipment pre-programmed with a VRA file using data from zonal soil or crop testing and analysis, or remote sensing. The VRA equipment must be connected to a tractor or sprayer-mounted crop reflectance sensor. The PRF1 does not cover micro-nutrients or lime. The data informing the VRA file must cover a minimum of P, K, Mg and pH. If the data is from zonal soil testing analysis, it must meet the action’s requirements and be less than five years old. For nitrogen, the VRA file must use data from crop testing and analysis or remote sensing of crop reflectance. Remote sensing should be carried out no more than 14 days prior to application to achieve the action’s aim.
Using Farm Tech to Maximise and Manage the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) Opportunity
With harvest wrapping up and the new farming season underway, many farmers are turning their attention to implementing sustainability practices through the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), which is set to become integral to many farm’s businesses. As the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) phases out, the SFI provides a valuable opportunity to support farm incomes while benefiting the environment. According to Defra’s most recent Farmer Opinion Tracker, 82% of farmers reported they were participating in or planning to apply for an agri-environment scheme.

Starting with basic actions like soil testing or nutrient management allows entry into the scheme without major changes to current practices. The scheme’s flexibility means you can begin with smaller commitments and expand over time. For example, a 200ha farm implementing basic actions could generate an extra £6,718 annually. More ambitious approaches, such as cover cropping and companion crops, can significantly boost earnings.

Some farms report net incomes over £48,000 per year by adopting land conversion options and stacking multiple SFI actions. You can layer actions, such as no insecticide use (IPM4) with companion crops (IPM3) and flower-rich margins (IPM2), to increase payments while enhancing biodiversity and encouraging beneficial insects.

The SFI 2024 offer introduces new options such as no-till establishment (£73 per hectare), variable rate nutrient application (£27 per hectare), and camera or sensor-guided herbicide spraying (£43 per hectare). These changes reflect an increased emphasis on precision farming and technology-driven land management.

Additional income sources, such as soil carbon schemes, further enhance this strategy. These schemes, which reward practices that sequester carbon in the soil, complement SFI actions like no-till farming and cover cropping, providing diversified revenue streams that are less vulnerable to changes in government policy.

Whether you’re drafting your first application or recording evidence for compliance, farm record-keeping tools like fieldmargin can streamline the entire process.

Planning Your SFI Application

Start planning your SFI application by identifying which actions best fit your farm and then where they can offer the most benefit.
1. Analyse underperforming areas: Review field gross margin reports, yield maps, and satellite imagery to spot consistently underperforming areas. These could be ideal for SFI actions like legume fallows or grass buffer strips, where reduced agricultural production can be offset by the environmental and financial benefits of the scheme. Tools like fieldmargin allow quick assessment of variation in field performance using NDVI analysis from satellite imagery, helping you make data-driven decisions.
2. Review historic field data: Notes on past issues like erosion, runoff, or pests, can help inform which SFI options might be most effective. Targeting areas with recurring challenges can help address these problems while fulfilling SFI requirements.
3. Consider your farm strategy: If you’re planning a transition to regenerative practices, look for SFI options that align with these changes. Explore opportunities to enhance public funding with private schemes, like carbon credits.
Mapping and Managing SFI Implementation

After selecting SFI actions, mapping them across your fields is crucial. Fieldmargin’s tools allow for streamlined mapping, note-taking, and record-keeping, all in one place.
- Map field divisions for environmental actions: Having a digital map that you and your team can work from which includes SFI actions, such as grassy field corners (AHL3) or flower-rich margins (IPM2) means nothing gets missed and you have the correct areas for field operations. With fieldmargin’s sub-fields you can quickly mark these divisions out on your fields including automatically adding in margins.
- Plan work required for compliance: Planning tasks like field work and soil sampling ensures that the necessary actions for your SFI agreement are not missed. Fieldmargin allows you to plan, set due dates, and assign tasks to your team members, keeping the workflow organised.
- Map hedgerows and watercourses: If your SFI plan includes hedgerow or watercourse management, incorporate these features into your digital map to keep track of assessments and improvements.
Record Evidence for inspections

With the right system in place, keeping evidence of your compliance with SFI requirements is easy.
- Record field work: Plan and log field operations, including inputs and attaching files or photos, such as seed invoices or establishment photos, so all required evidence is stored centrally.
- Use Geolocated Notes: Document actions with geolocated notes across your farm. Attach photos of flowering pollinator strips or log hedge assessments directly in the field.
- Track Income and Costs: Incorporate SFI payments and related costs into your gross margin calculations. Using cost tracking in a tool like fieldmargin helps you assess the financial impact of the scheme easily.
The Sustainable Farming Incentive presents a valuable opportunity to enhance farm environmental impact and financial resilience. With the right planning and tools (such as fieldmargin) in place, you can get the financial benefit for your farm without the administration being a burden.
In pursuit of pixel perfect

Although artificial intelligence can help achieve wondrous things, it’s only as good as the information it’s learnt from. Tech Farmer looks at how synthetic imagery could take green-on-green precision to new levels.

Written by Lucy de la Pasture

Although per plant farming may have suffered a setback with the loss of the Small Robot Company, the vision for this ultimate precision in spray application is far from dead. While there are over 300 agricultural robotics companies globally and that number is increasing, uptake of a technology many view as progressive remains slow.

In the meantime, major players in the sprayer manufacture market have green-on-green solutions available or in the pipeline, all with the aim of significantly reducing the quantity of pesticides applied, paring costs and diminishing environmental impacts.

Current green-on-green technology is dependent on artificial intelligence (AI) which has been trained to recognise targets within a crop. This machine-learning process is underpinned by the analysis of huge data sets to develop algorithms relevant to different crops and the agronomy challenges faced. It’s a long and slow process, not just because of the time it takes to gather the imagery. Currently to get an accurate data set, cameras attempt to cover all possible scenarios such as growth stages, lighting and shadows, and then manually label every one of those images. A near impossible task and it’s these limitations of vision systems themselves that add to the challenge when training AI.

Colin Herbert

Alongside the big brands, specialist agri-tech companies are bringing some typically out-of-the box thinking, allowing more novel approaches to potentially disrupt the market. One of these is Suffolk -based AgriSynth, which aims to bring a highly accurate but lower-cost solution to the pinch point that all the AI-driven systems have – teaching the AI.

It was a Star Wars movie that triggered the idea that the AgriSynth concept has been built on, explains Colin Herbert, Agrisynth’s founder and CEO. Watching the movie, the computer-generated imagery struck him and then it just clicked that there was a way of making up images by using a computer to generate them.

With the seed of an idea, Colin began to research the field of synthetic imagery, which is where pictures are generated using computer graphics, simulation methods and AI to represent reality. To his surprise he found that although synthetic imagery was being developed in the medical field, for example, it wasn’t being looked at in agriculture.

The use of synthetic images in machine learning solves two major problems – image acquisition and labelling, explains Colin. “A raw image means nothing to AI software; it has to learn how to classify different objects in an image and this is done by a process of labelling.”

Traditionally, there are several ways to annotate images to teach AI systems. Bounding boxes are rectangles drawn in software around an object – a weed, a stone, and so on – and it’s a relatively quick and easy thing to do. But there are limitations when it comes to accuracy.

“Bounding boxes can’t account for things like an object in part shadow, leaves that are overlapping, or the leaves of a weed that are mostly hidden behind a weed of another species. It can be very difficult to see where one plant starts and another one finishes in many images, especially with grassweeds.

An infinite number of real-world scenarios can be produced as demonstrated in this image of four different species.

“A better development is to draw a polygon around the object, and this allows us to account in some way for some of these real-world scenarios. We can also take it a step further and classify every pixel within the polygon, but even with this degree of accuracy there are edge effects. For example, drawing a polygon either just inside or outside a leaf margin may lose shape information that’s crucial for AI feature extraction and classification.

“The advantage of synthetic images is that they can deliver 100% accurate annotation at a pixel perfect level, something that’s not possible with real-world images. That’s a breakthrough,” says Colin.

As well as providing very precise information for machine learning, synthetic images can be produced for numerous different scenarios, such as crop or disease progression – even simulating scenarios that haven’t yet happened – removing another weakness in the real-time or historic imagery currently used in agricultural AI systems and potentially enabling a rapid response to a new agronomic threat.

Currently AgriSynth has developed three imaging engines; one is for broadleaf plants, another is for grass-type plants, and a third is for grain quality characteristics.

“For the broadleaf weed engine, we’ve developed lots of rules so that it knows how a typical plant develops. We can texture the leaves and configure it to mimic a growing plant, rather like a time-lapse photographic sequence for a particular species.

“We define plant characteristics such as leaf shape, texture, thickness, and the number of leaves per plant, as well as the variance that can be found around these characteristics as the plant grows. We can even produce leaves with blemishes to mimic disease issues or damage from insect pests. With many thousands of parameters, we can configure the engines to produce huge datasets of images very rapidly for specific species with variances seen in the real world.”

Grassweeds within cereal crops pose a particular problem when training AI systems due to the additional layers of complexity in identifying them compared with broadleaf weed recognition. AgriSynth has just completed a SMART project funded by Innovate UK, in collaboration with Real-Time Tech and Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), which set out to develop a blackgrass engine which can be used to train AI at <10% of real-world costs.

Grain samples can be synthetically generated to contain quality defects.

The project involved field trials where blackgrass was photographed in winter wheat crops, some of which were facilitated by CHAP, explains Agri-Tech Centre’s innovation sector lead, Dr Richard Glass. Further trials were conducted Oxford Agricultural Trials (OAT) who undertook three trials at Woodstock, Stratton Audley & Shillington. The team captured over 108,000 high quality images from structured plots that allow AgriSynth to classify both wheat and blackgrass in every image.

“These real-life images were used to validate the accuracy of the synthetic imagery generated to train the blackgrass engine,” explains Richard.

The ability to target blackgrass precisely within winter wheat crops is something that’s attracting the interest of farmers, not just because of the cost burden of an overall programme of the herbicides needed to control it, but also because of the relentless progress of herbicide resistance.

“Blackgrass costs farmers £400M a year in lost yield and increasing levels of resistance means that controlling using a dwindling number of selective herbicides is unlikely to be sustainable in the long-term, so we have to find new ways of controlling it,” explains Colin.

Delayed drilling is an effective cultural tool to reduce the blackgrass challenge but changing weather patterns are upping the risk of not getting a crop in when drilling into October. The pressure is growing to plant wheat in September to make sure a crop is established before it’s too wet.

One of the major advantages of synthetic imagery is the level of detail that can be labelled to facilitate machine learning. It’s greater than the human eye can see.

The ability to target blackgrass precisely opens the door to using non-selective herbicides, such as glyphosate, or even herbicides not normally used in the crop. These methods are already practiced in Australia to help control resistant ryegrass.

“By precision, I mean the ability to target an area of 5mm x 5mm and using the synthetic imagery developed in this project, we can clearly recognise, distinguish and classify blackgrass in wheat in a precise pixel-level manner,” explains Colin.

“We’ve developed a targeting system where we can alter the resolution of the treatment from 25mm down to 1mm depending on the grid system we overlay. This gives us the ability to be more aggressive if there’s lots of blackgrass and the farmer could accept losing say 10% of the crop in these areas if an active such as glyphosate was applied.”

The company is now ready to develop the hardware to square the circle and make such precise applications a reality. “We’re looking at the concept of what would essentially be an inkjet printer or micro-spray system for crops,” he adds.

Blackgrass is the first use case and further development within the project will enable other species to be classified in a wide range of conditions.

AgriSynth has also worked with a Canadian company to develop a grain ‘engine’ which will be used to help tackle the problem of grain quality, explains Colin. “Canadian red wheat has about 85 quality characteristics, including things such as chalky grains, broken grains, fusarium grains and green grains. And depending on the profile of those characteristics, it will affect the value of the wheat,” he explains.

“The grain trading process, end to end, is based on sampling the grain, assessing its quality and coming up with a price. And currently the farmer doesn’t have much say in that. The quality assessment is carried out by skilled humans that train for 6-7 years but it’s still subjective, based on the quality of the sampling and generally funded by the buyer.”

Synthetic imagery could improve the accuracy of the assessment and because some quality characteristics are rare, it’s perfectly placed to produce a data set to train AI that would take years using real life imagery, believes Colin.

“We’ve produced these images and trained a model on some of the characteristics and can then link to a camera on the combine to take images of the grain as it comes into the tank. Assessing the quality on the farm in this way could change the whole value chain of grain trading and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.”

Colin’s realistic that these changes won’t happen overnight and will meet resistance from the grain trade but he’s confident that over time, this information will be to the benefit of growers when it comes to selling their produce. And it’s just one example of many different crops where it would be to the grower’s advantage to adopt a similar approach.

“Vertical farming is an example where we could produce synthetic datasets to be certain the produce is blemish-free and of perfect quality for the supermarkets,” he adds.

So far AgriSynth is only touching the tip of the iceberg of what could be possible using synthetic imagery in agriculture – part of the company’s ethos is to stimulate innovation by making AI and machine learning more accessible to researchers and other companies.

The concept also extends to any area where subjective assessments are made by humans, such as those made in replicated small plot trials. “Identifying the percentage of a leaf infected by a disease is a skilled job but it’s subjective. Differentiating between two types of one disease is very skilled. Synthetic imagery opens the door to the whole of R&D being camera-enabled and objective, rather than human-enabled and subjective.

“And with billions of research plots around the world, that is a potential gamer-changer in the way we develop a range of solutions,” concludes Colin.

Green-on-green in practice

One of the companies at the forefront of bringing green-on-green technology to the field is French company Bilberry, bought by Trimble in 2022. With algorithms well-developed for crops in Australia and the US, the UK market is more of a challenge with its crops predominantly drilled at relatively narrow row spacing.

Keen to assess the technology early doors, Dyson Farming Research added the Bilberry system to its new Dammann Profi Class self-propelled sprayer. Since its arrival in September 2020, the team – led by trainee agronomist George Mills, who was previously a sprayer operator for the company – has been assessing its capabilities and helping Bilberry build an image database to further develop and refine its set of algorithms for the UK.

The Bilberry system has been independently evaluated by Dyson Farming Research since 2020 and has advantages in maize but doesn’t yet offer the capability to spot spray blackgrass in wheat crops.

The Bilberry system is capable of green-on-brown and green-on-green applications. The green-on-brown gives the ability to spot spray weeds in stubbles so has primarily been used with glyphosate to create stale seedbeds in the autumn. It’s a capability that George rates as ‘really successful’ and has a lot of confidence in using.

When it comes to green-on-green, the algorithms are still limited but the Bilberry set-up currently has the capability of spotting broadleaf weeds, grassweeds in oilseed rape, any weeds in maize, and broadleaf weeds in grassland.

“Developing the algorithms is very slow because it requires images to be taken in the field, which then have to be labelled by a human to enable the AI to learn for itself,” says George.

The Dyson team has helped Bilberry with algorithm development by sending images to Bilberry as the sprayer goes through crops. “The cameras take images every 30 seconds as the sprayer goes through a field and these are stored on a hard drive in the sprayer which we later download and send to France for algorithm learning,” he explains.

The 36m sprayer boom has RGB cameras mounted above it at 3m spacing, which means that when the booms are folded the cameras are above the cab. “It’s one of the drawbacks we’ve found with the system,” says George. “The cameras are vulnerable because of where they’re mounted and you have to be very careful not to damage them accidentally. If a camera needs repair, it has to go to France which isn’t a quick process and means the sprayer may have to work with a camera missing.”

The 36m Dammann sprayer boom has RGB cameras mounted above it at 3m spacing, a position which can make them vulnerable when the boom is folded.

It’s fair to say green-on-green application has been a learning experience and success has been mixed. “We’ve targeted volunteer potatoes in winter wheat with fluroxypyr between the T1 and T2 timings which worked to some extent for volunteers that were showing above the canopy. The drawback is shading which meant it wasn’t possible for the AI to spot most volunteer potatoes below the canopy – these had a 90-95% miss rate.”

The extra pass needed also highlights another downside of green-on-green applications, he highlights. “Generally, spot spraying herbicides means an extra pass because we’re targeting the whole crop when we’re applying fungicides and PGRs. The cameras also require good light levels to function which may mean missed opportunities early or late in the day.”

The farm grows oats and vetch for its anaerobic digester and a problem with charlock in a field provided an opportunity to test the broadleaf weed algorithm. “It’s possible to set a threshold for the algorithm to trigger a spot application and we used this to find out whether we could target charlock by its larger size, hopefully limiting any damage to the smaller leaved vetch. By setting the threshold at 60%, we managed to take out the largest charlock and although we did sacrifice some vetch it was at an acceptable level.”

Testing the grassweeds in OSR algorithm has had limited testing, admits George, but the system has really come into its own for weeds in maize. “It’s easy for the camera to see weeds in the maize crop and we’ve found a 90% hit rate on flagged weeds when we’ve conducted efficiency tests. With a potential 60-90% saving in herbicide costs, we’ll be using the system as much as is logistically possible in maize.”

It’s the degree of those potential savings in herbicide costs that need to be considered carefully before investing in a green-on-green system. “The Bilberry set up on the sprayer cost around £100,000 in 2020. – the system itself was around £70,000 and additionally we had to specify options on the sprayer that we wouldn’t otherwise have needed.”

There are lots of advantages to having the Bilberry system over and above the potential to reduce pesticide use and the environmental benefits that brings, says George. “Spot spraying could be a way of increasing the longevity of active ingredients and the sprayer components aren’t working as hard as when broadcast spraying, potentially meaning sprayers could have longer lives or a move to a smaller machine may be feasible.”

For many growers, the capability to spot treat blackgrass would offer the biggest potential savings in herbicide but George reckons it’s still not close to becoming a commercial reality.

“Bilberry has developed an algorithm for grassweeds in cereal crops, but it relies on weeds being visible above the canopy. That’s too late for treating blackgrass in the UK as we’re applying chemistry in the autumn when the blackgrass is still very small.”

Although it’s still early days for green-on-green technology, the degree of development in this area is a promising sign that any current weaknesses may soon be overcome.
Agronomist in Focus – Simon Francis

New ‘boots-on-the-ground’ precision farming service

A new service makes the benefits of precision farming accessible without growers having to master all its complexities, says ProCam’s UK Technical and Services Manager, Simon Francis.

Using satellite mapping of soil and crop variability across fields, the new FieldSense service derives tailored variable rate input applications to improve economic crop output across the field and bring environmental gains.

However, what makes FieldSense particularly appealing is that the system is based on a collaborative approach between the agronomist and grower.

It will be the ProCam agronomist who makes sense of the field data, drawing on their boots-on-the-ground experience of the field and ground-truthing any anomalies that the data might reveal. This can be combined with the farmer’s own knowledge of the field as necessary. Once the data has been interpreted, the agronomist will produce variable rate files for downloading directly to the tractor that is controlling the drill or fertiliser applicator. It is precision agronomy through partnership.

Growers can also cherry pick only those parts of the package relevant to their farm and machinery and can begin by trying FieldSense over just a few hectares.

This first phase launch will focus on four key areas for combinable cropping: grid-based soil sampling; variable rate seeding; variable rate nitrogen, phosphate, potash and lime applications; and yield mapping input.

The process starts by mapping fields into various sized grids – for example one hectare squares for soil sampling, 24 metres squared grids for variable rate fertiliser spreading, and 6 metres squared grids for variable rate drilling, or the most appropriate grid size tailored for the width of machine.

The variable rate drilling package in FieldSense uses historical field performance maps to show the variations in crop biomass that have occurred in that field over multiple years. From these, the agronomist will create a variable seed rate plan – to drill proportionally more seed in historically lower biomass grid squares and less seed where needed – with the aim of achieving a uniform, optimum tiller density over the whole field.

In one test, we’ve found that almost double the seed rate was needed in poorer areas of a field to bring tiller numbers back up towards the better areas. Without this knowledge, poorer areas would have been drilled at sub-optimal density, risking sub-optimal yield.

Variable rate seed drilling and fertiliser application are just two of the packages available in ProCam’s new FieldSense service

For soil sampling, the location of where samples were taken from in each hectare is captured by GPS and shared back to the FieldSense platform. Samples can be analysed using ProCam’s SoilSense service, with the resulting gridded nutrient maps used by the agronomist to create variable rate spreading files to correct phosphate and potash deficiencies, and for liming if required.

Variable rate nitrogen application, on the other hand, uses satellite NDVI measurements of the growing crop. These are taken every five to seven days on a 10m x 10m grid or every three to five days on a 3m x 3m grid. Here, the aim is to use variable rate nitrogen to produce the optimum green area index (GAI) over the whole field. Farm-testing in oilseed rape where GAI in March was found to vary from a near optimum of 3.0 to just 1.0, showed that by varying nitrogen between 60 and 90 kg/ha, crop uniformity was corrected by early June.

In fields where yield mapping is carried out on the combine harvester, yield data can also be uploaded into FieldSense to guide future agronomic decisions.

Simon Francis explains that it will be the ProCam agronomist who makes sense of the satellite images, drawing on their boots-on-the-ground experience, rather than growers having to do everything themselves

The launch of FieldSense is the latest in a sequence of technical introductions from ProCam, following on from the launch of the soil testing and nutrient planning service, SoilSense, last year.

Growers face increasingly heavy workloads and pressures from legislation and environmental scrutiny, while at the same time, farm profits are volatile and under pressure.

FieldSense provides a way for ProCam agronomists to take some of the complexity out of precision farming for growers, while bringing greater accuracy to agronomic decisions. In the case of variable rate application of nutrients, there are also potential SFI payments available of £27/ha.

In essence, FieldSense offers focused use of key inputs for optimum crop output through partnership, technology and boots-on-the-ground collaboration. Satellite image field maps are one element of precision farming, but they are just the start. They need underpinning with solid field experience to interpret and make sense of them.
We can benefit from innovation

Our production systems must become more resilient in order to combine productivity, climate protection and biodiversity. How can this be achieved, what role does digitalisation play, and where are the new opportunities? We pose these and other questions to Hubertus Paetow, President of DLG in Germany.

The advancing climate change, increasing loss of biodiversity, the growing population and the associated global demand for resources will shape future arable farming. How can these challenges be met?

I believe we need to become much more open to everything that can be roughly categorised as innovation in the direction of greater sustainability. The theme of the field days “Out of the box” shows this. We naturally find it difficult to understand progress in terms of questioning the familiar and looking for something new. Especially when the familiar works quite well in the short term.

In the entire toolbox of innovations, we must never exclude anything from the start because the problem determines the solution, and not the other way around. Neither 100% organic farming, 100% smart farming nor 100% genetic engineering will help us, but it will probably be a mixture of everything.

DLG President Hubertus Paetow manages an arable farm in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Photo credit: DLG

Are there only conflicting interests between production and ecology. Which innovations benefit both goals equally?

Admittedly, some conflicts of interest cannot be resolved even with the best formulations, nor can they be resolved with technical progress. The trivial wisdom that where there is a dense crop of wheat, there will not be enough flowers for pollinating insects is a fact. And the fact that we need this wheat population for land productivity is not something we can change much with innovations.

It is much more a question of achieving a better balance. The concept of productivity plays a role here. We are used to measuring productivity in tonnes per hectare, but that is only half the truth. Of course, the breeding pairs of skylarks per hectare are just as much a part of ecological productivity. Or the avoidance of nitrate input into the groundwater, and so on. As always, when we have such conflicts, it’s best if we measure and balance them somehow.

Are innovations a Unique Selling Point?

Absolutely, and in Germany, we have to make sure that it stays that way. After all, we don’t have the lowest land costs or the lowest labour costs – we can only be competitive through efficiency and that depends on innovation. Any political measure that limits the scope for innovation really needs to be very well justified. We can still score points through innovation, we just have to make sure that we handle the delicate plant carefully.

If sustainability can be evaluated objectively, does it matter whether our systems are organic, conventional or regenerative?

It is not a given that an organic farm will perform better in the overall sustainability assessment than a well-managed conventional farm. In this respect, this system of indicators is dependent on agreement being reached at some point. That is the biggest problem, because the indicators are described, as is the methodology for recording and evaluating them.

Let’s take farm-to-fork as an example. Indicators were wildly plucked out of the air for this. Is a 50% reduction in pesticides really a useful indicator for biodiversity conservation? I say no, because it can develop just as well if I don’t reduce crop protection so much, but instead establish a wider crop rotation, for example.

The use of chemical crop protection will become more challenging in the future. How can production and environmental interests be balanced here?

It is always extremely damaging to think in rigid categories about improving sustainability. If you publicly announce that you want to reduce the use of pesticides and see this as an end in itself, then no company will develop new active ingredients because they know they can’t sell them, even if this active ingredient is ‘biodiversity friendly’. That is the great disadvantage of losing sight of the actual goal – namely biodiversity conservation – when creating political instruments.

The world won’t get any better just because we only spray half as much. It may well be that we can achieve this target in a different way, which may be better than with a rigid reduction or territorial framework.

Many see ‘digitalisation’ as the key to the future. Where is the problem and what promises success?

It always becomes difficult when several components have to work together and data cannot overcome certain restrictions between different systems. There is still a lot of catching up to do. Let’s take the example of combined chemical-mechanical weed control in sugar beet, i.e. band spraying and hoeing. Here you always have different machine and equipment manufacturers involved and no one can offer you a system ‘out of the box’. As the DLG, we are trying to make progress in this area with a platform like FarmRobotix.

I see the greatest potential in AI-supported decision-making systems. Is the pest below the damage threshold? Can I do without treatment? Many farm managers still find it difficult to make this decision and take the risk. If they had greater certainty through the use of AI, it would be easier. And of course, the most biodiversity-friendly measure is the one I don’t take at all.
First look: Innovations that might be on your farm

Around 2,500 delegates attended the World AgriTech Innovation Summit in San Francisco in March. Mike Abram went along to hear about some new exciting innovations.

If you’re the CEO or founder of an agritech start-up, or looking to find such companies, it’s the place to be. If you’re the global head of sustainability or digital agriculture for a global food brand, retailer, machinery or ag input manufacturer it’s also a more-than-useful event to be seen and perhaps heard.

If you’re a farmer, it’s probably not even on your radar, at least based on attendance lists, although any farmer interested in new tech will find a huge amount to be interested in. The price of entry might put you off though.

The place is San Francisco in March, where the largest of five World AgriTech Innovation Summits around the world takes place.

Around 2,500 attendees meet for an event that is a mix of conference – panel sessions discussing topics such as regenerative agriculture, artificial intelligence, new breeding techniques and future of agtech funding – and exhibition both for established agtech companies and start-ups looking to tell the world about their big idea and hopefully encourage new investment to help make it a reality.

Among those firms was Crop Diagnostix, which is attempting to bring crop intelligence to a new level by analysing hole punch size leaf samples to understand plant health.

But unlike more traditional plant health tests, which rely on visual symptoms for diagnosis or tissue tests that could give inconsistent results, Crop Diagnostix analyses the plant leaf’s RNA to reveal the plant’s gene expression, CEO Brandon Chi explained.

“We help plants communicate with farmers and agronomists,” he said. “The power of gene expression is that genes within the plant are turning on and off in response to environment constantly.

“A plant can look green and healthy but be feeling some signs of nutrient deficiency or starvation. Through gene expression we can look at all facets of plant health at the earliest possible stage and because we don’t need visual symptoms to make a diagnosis, we can see that at a much earlier stage,” he said.

For example, in corn, growers could start to understand plant health from the V2 to V3 stage rather than V5 or later. “This gives the farmer weeks of actionability in advance compared with other technologies.”

Once the leaf RNA is analysed, Crop Diagnostix uses machine learning to mine through gene expression data to understand which genes are switched on or off to figure out what’s happening in the plant.

That could help answer questions around nutrient stress or even whether a plant was able to reach maximum yield potential based on the current gene expression, Brandon suggested.

With an infinite number of possibilities for the technology, Crop Diagnostix is initially concentrating on helping growers with nitrogen applications and other nutrient deficiencies in corn, after the initial research by co-founder Joseph Swift for his PhD found biomarkers that could predict yield and nutrient stress based on genetic expression in rice.

“We hope to launch a commercial product in 2025, and then rapidly scale up for 2026,” Brandon said. Samples will cost around $20 (£16)compared with $30-60 for a spectroscopy sample, with the added benefit that it is non-destructive and it doesn’t matter which leaf is sampled.

Other areas of trials include club root in oilseed rape and fusarium in onion where the company is involved in trials in the UK.

“These are high pain point pathogens with long asymptomatic periods that growers aren’t able to detect early on.”

Another company providing crop intelligence to farmers is Taranis, which uses drones to capture crop imagery at submillimetre resolution to monitor fields through the entire season, complemented with data from satellite imagery.

Already a commercial offer covering millions of acres of corn, soybeans and cotton in the USA and Brazil, the company had more recently started providing a service to sugar beet and potato growers in Germany, with France likely to follow soon, CEO Opher Flohr told Tech Farmer.

“Our biggest differentiator, which I’m not aware of anyone else doing, is offering very high leaf level resolution at 0.3 mm/pixel.

“To give a little perspective we would be able to read your business card from the sky or see the spots on a ladybird. There’s no difference between that and a human being standing over a weed and looking with their own eyes.”

The same kind of resolution is possible using the firm’s proprietary imaging pod on a plane which has patented technology to fix the image in the same position even while the plane is flying at full speed.

“It uses mirrors, gyros and different lasers to take the same, perhaps even slightly better imaging than we can with off-the-shelf drones,” Opher said.

Once a grower has signed up for the service, which in the US costs around $13/ac (£26/ha) through an ag retailer, and provided field location, crop and planting date, Taranis automatically schedules all the drone or plane flights.

“We operate all the pilots,” Opher said. “Making sure the pilots arrive at the field at the right crop stage to deliver insight and value to the farmer, while building the right software and tools to optimise flight plans and image quality is a huge task, which is probably why we haven’t seen anyone else provide a service like this.”

As well as weed identification, Taranis also offers accurate, AI-powered insights into plant stands – extremely useful to help provide precise information about replanting decisions that can provide a large return on investment – and disease, pest and nutrition insights.

Soils are, not surprisingly, a big growth area for investment in agtech with new ideas at the event aiming to potentially help farmers improve soil health or understanding and management of their key asset.

Mexican/American biotech start-up Solena is using its AI-driven Prometheus platform to analyse and compare the functions of microbes from two different performing areas of a field or farm, for example the highest and lowest yielding parts.

“All farmers know what the best or worst performing areas on a farm are,” chief financial officer Gerardo Guerrero told Tech Farmer. “So if the seed is the same, the climate, the irrigation system, the difference is in the microbiome.”

That information can then be used to recommend how to improve the poorer performing areas with customised inputs, including dose and timing, based on the soil microbiome.

Initial use cases have concentrated on finding differences in pathogens to help target biological or chemical input use to boost crop performance, or, in the case of a potato project with PepsiCo in north Mexico to help growers identify when they don’t need to apply pesticides.

“We were able to reduce chemical applications by 30% compared with the previous season, while maintaining yields,” Gerardo said.

That kind of in-season analysis would help PepsiCo to drive regenerative agriculture adoption without losing productivity, he noted.

Californian-based Biome Makers is on a similar path with its soil microbiome analysis. Over the past 10 years the firm has analysed soils from six continents, 56 countries and over 200 crops to build a database of over 24m microorganisms, making it, according to Biome Makers, the largest database of soil data.

“What we do is decode soil biology to optimise farming practices and improve soil health,” explained Sarah Basiri, global head of marketing. “We extract microbial DNA from the soil, analyse it, and then using our BeCrop Technology, we analyse the functions of microorganisms to understand what is happening below ground.”

Ralph Weir Zayndu credit Zayndu

The results provide key agronomic insights, such as early disease detection, identification of beneficial microbes with positive impacts on pests or diseases, or ones that mobilise a whole range of nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, as well as micronutrients.

It also helps farmers understand whether there are microbes present that are linked to withstanding stress conditions or promoting or regulating crop growth, such as auxins, cytokinins and gibberellins.

“Farmers and advisers can use these results to understand how management practices and ag inputs impact the soil microbiome,” Sarah said. “And we can also help advisers provide tailored recommendations and place the correct product based on these biological insights.”

A single introductory test cost $199 (£159), although buying the service through an ag retailer in the US brought the cost down to $3-9/acre (£6-18/ha), Sarah said.

Pluton Biosciences is also trying into tap into the world of microbes, but this time in pursuit of consortia of microbes that will solve particular challenges. “Why try to rediscover the wheel when you can search for microbes that are already doing what you’re looking for,” suggested Adam Blaszczak, Pluton Bioscience’s vice-president of R&D.

One of the first development products emerging from the micro-mining process undertaken by the firm was a microbial consortium that will capture carbon from the atmosphere, Adam told Tech Farmer.

The concept, which started as a collaboration with Bayer, is based on the observation that soil microbe pioneers in the desert can live off carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere, forming a film of crust on the soil surface.

Pluton’s proof of concept research predicts the right grouping of microbes, applied in a spray at planting and harvest can scrub 1t/acre/year of CO₂e from the atmosphere to help address climate change while replenishing nutrients in the soil, potentially earning farmers carbon credits.

“The idea is they could be an alternative to cover crops, while also helping to reduce soil erosion and fertiliser requirements in following crops,” Adam said.

Field testing of the first generation was due this spring, while next generation development was already underway with the potential to add microbes that secreted a molecule that looked like coal to store carbon more permanently in the soil, he added.

Could next generation seed priming improve crop performance?

Both biostimulants and elicitors have had their fair share of challenges in gaining the trust of farmers, mostly because the performance of both has been inconsistent at best.

But two start-up companies at the World AgriTech Innovation Summit were suggesting that they had developed products that would change that perception.

UK-based start-up Zayndu uses cold plasma – a kind of ionised gas – to activate the air around seeds, explained CEO Ralph Weir.

“That improves seed health in a number of ways. Firstly, it kills off any pathogens that might be on the seed surface.

“It also removes the waxy layer that seeds are coated in, which is there to waterproof the seed. That’s counterintuitive when you think seeds need water to germinate.”

Ralph Weir Zayndu credit Zayndu

The plasma creates micro fissures on the seed surface which helps moisture get into seeds, with the combined effect of enabling the seed to germinate more quickly.

“Activating the air also re-arranges the nitrogen into nitrates and nitrites, which are noted for being fertilisers, and by also creating these little fissures, it enables the fertiliser to get close to the embryo,” Ralph said.

“Now the seeds have quick and easy access to water and fertiliser just as we are about to plant them.

“We also tweak the hormone balance in the seed a little bit, effectively saying it is your time to germinate – it removes any conservatism in the seed. A lot of seeds hold back energy when germinating in case of drought or other stress, but our technology is mostly designed for greenhouses or other controlled environments so you don’t need to worry about those things.

“The end result is quicker germination, and bigger, stronger seedlings and roots. And it turns out if you do that in the wild and there is a drought, it’s actually in a better place because of the stronger roots. We typically see something like 20% uplift in yields, or it allows a grower to hit spec size or weight more quickly – say in 20 days rather than 23 days in a greenhouse , which means you can do more cycles in a year.”

Zero Gravity Solutions, meanwhile, is using a plant priming platform originally developed for NASA to grow robust, nutrient-dense plants in hostile environments.

“We offer a next generation biostimulant technology,” CEO John McLean claimed. “It’s a product that allows plants to protect themselves.

“The way our product works is we developed a set of chemical elicitors that the plant perceives as a stress signal,” he explained.

That signal causes the plant to grow faster to get to the next generation by producing seed more quickly, and in some cases, depending on the nature of the stress signal, encourages the plant to produce antioxidant molecules which resist disease, he said.

“As climate becomes more variable in terms of temperature and water availability, it’s helpful for plants to be able to activate its natural defences. The plant can react to diseases and stresses but pre-priming acts like a vaccine, and allows the plant to respond quickly and aggressively to these kinds of stresses and challenges.”

Elicitors in the past had struggled with the natural conflict between energy used to produce defence mechanisms and the energy needed to produce yield, he said. “We’ve addressed both of those issues.

“Our elicitors are designed to activate a number of pathways simultaneously inside the plant, so you get a broader set of protections against disease. Secondly, we have been able to understand the mode of action sufficiently to optimise the balance between improving yield and fighting disease.”

While the main focus for the product is high value fruit and vegetable crops, the firm has also investigated row crops, such as soybeans and wheat. “We’ve exciting data on soybean rust showing we can reverse infections and recover yields, while in wheat trials in India that showed yield increases of 30% when using the elicitor in combination with fertiliser over fertiliser treated wheat alone.”
Ensure Your No-Till Vision is 20/20 with Precision Technology
By Erin Hightower agronomist for RDO Equipment Company

Recently, I visited my optometrist for an annual eye examination. As we discussed my prescription, I experienced a familiar line of questioning while looking through different lenses: “Is one better?” Click. “Or two?” The optometrist leaned in and casually asked, “How about three?”

Instantly, every letter’s line was clear as day. It was then that I realised the stark similarities between these annual eye examinations and agronomic information systems.

During the International Tree Fruit Association meeting, a group of us reviewed an array of equipment and technology developed to create data-driven mapping for tasks like plant thinning, pruning or other various agronomic stages. Also, I recently spent time with Oregon State researchers to explore timing nutrient applications to enhance wheat protein while minimising waste.

These technologies allow its user to have a more nuanced understanding of Liebig’s Law of Minimum which asserts that the scarcest resource limits productivity. As mindful growers, we frequently think about which technology, software or equipment enhancement manages even the most limited resources effectively.

We ask ourselves:
- Can I still rely solely on my traditional crop management and data management practices?
- Is my farm data more evident when viewed through the lens of the app ‘two’ or equipment enhancement ‘three’?
- Would data-driven prescriptions create more efficient or sustainable practices?
Just like regular appointments with your optometrist often present opportunities to discuss improvements to your physical vision, seasonal calls with a trusted agronomist or equipment expert can improve your agronomic vision and reveal resource management improvements.

Consider a few questions you can revisit each season when discussing zone’s prescriptions and spraying application.

What are my limited resources?

Determining your limited resources each season will inform prescriptions and how they affect your labour, financial, or field nutrient resources. Factors like labour or growing degree days affect crop growth differently each year. We may have a labour shortage this year, but the next, we may have a harvest that is ‘all hands on deck no matter what’.

Each year needs to be evaluated since the availability of these resources may change depending on the season or specific crop. Discuss these factors with your trusted expert to determine how well you’ve identified your limited resources for the crop’s specific growing phase.

At a dryland wheat conference, I discussed pesticide mixing and compliance and the SurePoint QuickDraw Spray Tender Mixing System’s potential benefits with growers. The system utilises a recipe to set variable load-size mixing and precise measurement without the risk of human error or incorrect calculations.

At first, many growers found SurePoint QuickDraw’s price tag unfathomable — even with its proven input savings of accurate mixing in the application’s tank. What those growers didn’t see was the value it offered in its ability to reduce the risk of pesticide spills and decreased application errors due to poor mixing protocols.

If growers consider SurePoint QuickDraw’s investment compared to potential spill fines, plus team members’ medical bills, the initial investment may seem more reasonable. By evaluating its total agronomic, monetary, time savings, and risk reduction against the growing season’s limited resources, growers see spraying improvements for each field’s zone prescription.

What are my field zone’s tolerable sizes?

Before spraying in each field’s zone, set a minimum zone size for each variable rate application in your farm management software (FMS), like John Deere Operations Center™.

I learned this the hard way when helping a grower remotely set up a prescription for different variable rate field zones in the Operations Center. As the grower started to apply fertiliser, his rate controller could not keep up with the constant changes in the prescription, which caused the fertiliser system to fail to apply correct rates based on varying conditions across the field’s different zone. The right prescription has both a reasonable and measurable output.

A sampling grid of a quarter acre may be accurate but not manageable for your labour, equipment, or information processing systems. For your current operation understand how granular you can apply nutrients with your technology on hand, for the field’s variability. Reconsider new technology that can help increase granularity in application that may help you save. With patient industry, saving here and there, you might find unlocked potential in your farm.

Can existing equipment automatically read data?

We are experiencing a technological renaissance that would have seemed like science fiction just 30 years ago when it comes to data in the field. However, these impressive field mapping systems may have one potential setback: How do they translate technology mapping back into actionable input and decision-making?

For example, I conducted a side-by-side study to map fields using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with several different mapping systems in the same field. One aerial field map produced intricate wine grape maps that resembled artwork. (I still want to frame them on my wall.) Yet, the practical vineyard owner asked these questions after every flight:
- Can I automatically integrate this data into my machinery? (Which it could not for their application systems)
- Can the machinery use this data so I can test soil or check irrigation lines in zones created from these maps? (It couldn’t since the mapping was too granular to make actionable sections.)
We would need to spend hours of time with maps to synthesise the information to help discern irrigation rates. Numerous technologies in the agricultural industry focus on reading crop quality, quantity, and thinning targets. I feel most of these technologies have a rich future. However, only a small handful of known technologies can effectively apply insights from field inputs, and many are expensive. While data and equipment technology has exponentially improved the applications of spraying prescriptions, we should still be aware of our current limitations in automating equipment based on data integration.

Ask questions, adjust and future-proof operations

At times, we track ag data sets for documentation to provide evidence for future decisions. For years, as an example, we ‘spoon-fed’ the most fickle of agronomy systems: the potato.

We field-scouted and sampled small grids for soil levels. During the past 10 years, these data sets have informed field maps to improve zone prescriptions when applying fertiliser.

Recently during harvest, these data collections were validated when we started to receive updated yield data, signalling that mindful resource management — informed by data — delivered measurable results.

There is hope that these years’ worth of data will uncover new action steps. In the case of our potato fields, years of grid sampling, followed by the use of Greentronics systems with the Gen 4 and G5 John Deere displays, was the combination of corrections we needed to see clearly. We do have hope for the potential of useful information, but we need to ask the right questions, collect data in faith, and build the right adjustments once it becomes affordable and practical for your farm.

Just like when your glasses prescription slightly adjusts and you discover newfound clarity, collecting field zone data and making even seemingly minor adjustments can have long-lasting effects for your agronomic and financial future.
New technology connecting the lab to the field

Drone technology is unlocking the potential of traditional crop trials and helping to bridge the gap between detailed laboratory studies and field trials.

Drones were used to assess an oilseed rape trial this spring at a site in Yorkshire, gathering data that hasn’t been possible before.

The trial is a collaboration between Envirofield, Agrii and Yara. Envirofield is a crop research organisation that conducts independent trials. In 2022 it was acquired by Origin Enterprises, Agrii’s parent company.

Will Baldwin, director of Envirofield, says the business has maintained its independent status in the Origin group, but also benefits from being part of a bigger organisation. Most recently, this has included access to higher level technology via Agrii’s research and development drone technology to enhance trial assessments.

Will says: “Envirofield acquired a drone five years ago, but we didn’t have the capability to conduct assessments. It just gave us a nice visual perspective of a trial, with only the obvious differences showing.”

Jonathan Trotter, technology trials manager for Agrii has been operating the drone to assess the trial. He uses photogrammetry, a method in which the drone maps the trial with hundreds or thousands of high-resolution images stitched together for analysis.

He explains: “The brief from Envirofield was that Yara was interested in counting oilseed rape flowers and understanding how flowering is impacted by the products being tested. The exact details of the trial don’t concern me, my role is to help facilitate their work with the drone.

“I timed how long it took me to conduct an assessment using the drone. From opening my car door, doing the flight, packing the equipment away and finally closing the car door, it took 17 minutes!

“The drone flies across the plots at about 12 metres high. There are 40 plots, about 0.2ha, and the drone captures almost 400 images across the trial.

“Once the images are processed, every pixel equals 0.31cm of resolution,” explains Jonathan.

Agrii uses Solvi to analyse its drone images. Jonathan uploads the data to the platform, which takes about one hour to process.

Using a new tool that Solvi introduced, alongside Agrii’s experience with reflectance, Jonathan used the triangular greenness index (TGI) measurement. He explains that TGI filters out different wavelengths to remove specific colours, such as green and brown, leaving just yellow.

“TGI is perfect for only measuring flowering, which you can record as a percentage cover per plot, giving individual treatment results to monitor throughout the flowering period.

“This couldn’t have been done without a drone,” says Jonathan.

Chris Harrold, YaraVita product manager for Yara UK, says the company is investigating a range of pipeline products based on a mix of nutrients and biostimulants. Their global R&D team has found benefits in using them on flowering crops to improve flowering and pod set.

“We have been working on how we can develop these products in the UK on oilseed rape, peas and beans,” explains Chris.

“When our R&D team placed the trials with Envirofield, they requested a detailed flowering score assessment. Will Baldwin couldn’t imagine how they could accurately deliver this before drone technology was suggested.

“I saw the appeal of that, as did the R&D team. There’s a cost involved, but it’s only a fraction of the cost if we had tried to do it manually.”

The cold spring weather extended the trial’s flowering period longer than expected. Fortunately, since the drone assessments are relatively quick to conduct, Jonathan has been able to add additional assessments to cover all of the flowering.

Meanwhile the R&D team have been speaking to colleagues in Canada who expressed an interest in the work. They want to know if the methodology can be replicated in their country and if it works on other crops.

Chris continues: “Yara has been on board with the work from the outset. The results at the end of the year will reveal the benefits of the products we are testing. Regardless, I believe in the approach and can see its value in different crops and scenarios.”

He hopes to repeat the work next year to gather further data on Yara’s new products and expects the drone assessments to be an important part of the research.

Drone data enhances confidence in trials

Collecting data using drones allows Envirofield to have an archive of evidence showing how it produces its datasets from trials. Will Baldwin believes it gives companies placing trials with them confidence in their work.

He says: “We report what we find in the field at the time of assessment. The digital images taken by the drone can be revisited anytime to see exactly how the dataset was made. With traditional visual assessments, we rely on the eye of the assessor. If another party wants to look at the images, they can if they have permission.”

Will sees potential for drones to fill gaps in our understanding of new products as they go from being tested in glasshouses to small plot and tramline trials.

“What is possible in a glasshouse is not achievable in a field. If there are only one or two plants growing in a pot in a glasshouse, you can measure any physiological or pathological aspect you want in detail,” says Will.

“Once you scale that up to in-field measurement, assessment becomes more subjective due to the large area you must cover to include variability across each plot. We could use two trial agronomists to conduct an assessment depending on what is required. This helps to alleviate any unconscious bias in the data, but that doesn’t always eliminate it.”

In the short term, Will says drones will enable trial contractors to conduct assessments in the field that could previously only be done in a controlled environment. Looking further ahead, he believes they will make it possible to capture even minor differences and account for spatial variation across much larger-scale (tramline) trials and more frequent assessments possible.

He concludes: “Our job in R&D is to give growers the confidence that the data we are collecting is done in conditions that reflect growers’ actual practices.”

Drone in a box to allow autonomous operation

Although the drone assessments only took 17 minutes, Jonathan Trotter had a three-hour round trip to get to the site. Authorisation by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of the ‘drone in a box’ (DiaB) concept for trial use could eliminate the travel time and allow Agrii to assess the trials remotely and more frequently.

Jonathan explains: “Fully autonomous flight would allow us to capture the data daily to see exactly when the plots started flowering, and monitor that through the whole period to count how long each plot is flowering for and how extensive it was.”

In May, Agrii installed one of the first DiaB systems to be used for trial plot data collection and analysis in the UK at one of their sites in Yorkshire. The team is collaborating with DroneAg via Skippy Scout on this project.

“For now, we must use it with a person monitoring the drone as it flies autonomously. We have to be there with a visual line of sight and be able to take control if necessary,” says Jonathan.

“This is part of the process for us to prove autonomous drone flights are safe and possible to receive authorisation for fully autonomous flights.”

He expects Agrii to receive approval in 2025. The process is complex, with authorisations granted on a company-by-company basis. The CAA assesses each case on its merits, creating a high bar for the investment required.
Learning about machine learning
Written by Chris Fellows

Earlier this year, I attended an event in Bury, put on by Easy Compute, that highlighted opportunities for landowners to add a mobile data centre to their farms. This event caught my attention because, as a company, we spend a significant amount of money each year with Amazon and Microsoft on machine learning and AI processing. All of this processing is currently carried out in their data centres. The idea of having our own data centre on the farm, using our own AI processing power, is very appealing—especially if it can significantly reduce costs.

You might think you’ve never heard of a mobile data centre, but chances are you have. If you’ve ever heard of someone mining cryptocurrency at home, it’s essentially the same technology: a computer with a powerful graphics card capable of processing vast amounts of information. However, instead of using that processing power to solve problems and earn cryptocurrency, you can now rent out your processors to businesses running AI processing and get paid in cash. Alternatively, you can use the processing power for your own AI models, saving money—which is exactly what we’re considering.

What Is a Mobile Data Centre?

A mobile data centre is a compact, self-contained computing solution housed within a portable structure, such as a shipping container. Designed for rapid deployment, it provides high-performance computing resources for tasks like AI processing or cryptocurrency mining. Equipped with optimised cooling systems, robust power supply options, and advanced networking capabilities, these data centres offer scalability and flexibility. They can be deployed in diverse environments, from urban areas to remote locations, and are ideal for meeting high-demand computing needs while maintaining energy efficiency and mobility.

Practical Applications for AI

For our business, AI is helping us understand the sentiment behind farmers’ opinions on a wide range of topics. For instance, we can gauge how 20,000 different farmers feel about organisations like the NFU, Red Tractor, or Defra, as well as brands like John Deere. This kind of insight is becoming increasingly important for marketing. Companies want to understand how farmers feel, but it’s impossible to manually read everything that’s written by farmers.

The event, hosted by Easy Compute, aimed to help farmers and landowners understand the technology and its applications in three key areas:
- AI and Machine Learning
- Blockchain
- Cryptocurrency
Power Requirements

The primary input for a mobile data centre is power—a lot of it. Having a good electricity contract, or better still, generating your own power via solar or wind, is the ideal starting point.

A mobile data centre consumes power in several ways:
1. Computing Equipment (Servers and GPUs): The servers, processors, and specialised hardware like GPUs are the biggest power consumers, handling high-intensity calculations and data processing.
2. Cooling Systems: Keeping the hardware at optimal temperatures is essential. If you only have a single machine, it can happily warm your office without additional cooling!
3. Networking Equipment: Devices like routers, switches, and firewalls require electricity to keep the servers connected to the internet.
4. Lighting and Security Systems: Though a smaller expense, lighting, surveillance cameras, and other security measures still require some power, particularly for 24/7 operations.
Depending on your setup, profitability is still achievable even with electricity costs of 35p per kWh. However, costs drop significantly if you have a better contract or generate your own renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, where rates can be as low as 7p per kWh. For farms already selling power to the grid, using it to operate a data centre could be far more lucrative.

Making Use of Heat

The primary “waste” output from a data centre is heat—but that’s only waste if you can’t use it. A single computer in your office generates the equivalent heat of a 2kW heater. Twenty rigs in a container will produce a considerable amount of heat, which farms can repurpose:
- Drying or Maintaining Grain: Heat from the data centre can be used to dry grain over time, reducing the need for traditional grain dryers.
- Heating Sheds or Greenhouses: Chicken sheds, grow houses, or other heated spaces can utilise this waste heat.
- Slurry and Methane Capture: Combining a data centre with systems like the Bennamann methane capture system is highly efficient. Heating the slurry generates even more methane, which can then be used to feed the generator that powers the data centre itself. This means operating a data centre would be basically free, using the methane reduces a farms carbon footprint as well. However, I’m not sure most people think of dairy farms as the “perfect” place to have a data centre! But I think they just might be.
Diversification

We all know that multiple revenue streams for farming businesses reduces overall risk. Whether that be different crops, agri-tourism, AD or renewable energy. Mobile data centres represent a low-maintenance diversification option. Unlike holiday lets, you don’t need extra staff, cleaning services, or marketing efforts. This solution works particularly well alongside renewable energy.

While this technology has been used extensively in crypto currency mining historically, this would not be the main focus for me. Crypto mining relies heavily on the price of the currencies at any given time. It builds in more risk (although prices just keep going up).  Some people also have ethical issues with using power from the grid to produce a crypto currency, but there are plenty of companies that have made significant sums from coins like Bitcoin.

I remember stating proudly in 2013 that buying bitcoin was madness, at $8 a coin. Which clears up that I have made some bad decisions when it comes to crypto in the past. A £1000 investment in 2013 would now be worth £11 million today and you would be missing out on my writing skills.

A Mobile Data Centre is like an Airbnb

During the event I quite liked this analogy. It’s something many farmers are familiar with, having properties, tents or caravans to rent on their farms. If you have a machine with 5 processors in it. You effectively have 5 properties to let. You can let them short term for a higher daily price or long term to a cheaper daily rate. But you aim is always to keep you occupancy as high a possible to get most reward from your property. Having a data centre on your farm is just the same. You want to keep it rented out as much as possible.

And in the same way Cottages for You will rent out your holiday cottages for you, there are websites lie Vast.ai and RunPod that help you rent out your processors for. Companies like Easy Compute can help you with this process.

Also, when your processors aren’t being rented out for AI, you could use the spare time to generate some crypto currency. If you are happy with the risk, you could still choose to do this. With the reward you receive being variable based on the price of the coin. Some people are suggesting the price of bitcoin to rise to $250,000 while others are saying it will be worthless. While the total value of bitcoin in circulation, is worth more than the total value of the silver market, would you feel more comfortable owning bitcoin or silver?

Bitcoin price for last 3 years in USD

Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT

You may have heard of ChatGPT, which is OpenAI’s version of AI. To “teach” their AI they have processed information from across the internet using graphics cards in data centres around the world. Based on this, ChatGPT can now answer questions – and every question asked requires more processor usage.   Subscriber numbers are growing the tech is being used more and more.

But the more people that use the like of ChatGPT, the more computers and graphics cards are needed to process these requests. Some of this infrastructure is owned by the companies, like Microsoft. Some of it is rented from others. And this AI needs powerful computers and these computers use GPUs. Meta (Facebook) on its own will have 350,000 GPUs in its data centre by the end of the year.

Typical computer rig with graphics cards

The Costs

With any diversification, it is all about the costs. Investment versus reward. Is the waste heat worth anything to you? What does you electricity cost? When considering a bigger mobile data centre or even a single rig with 4 processors, you need to consider it within the context of your farm, your power costs and your heating needs.

A single rig uses about 1000 units of electric a month. If your electric cost 12p per unit, a 4-processor rig will cost around £120 a month in electric. This figure needs to be adjusted then for exactly what you pay, be this the price you pay or the price you export at. This could be as high a £240 a month or as low as £50 a month.

You set an hourly rate per processor to rent it. A typical rate is £0.40 GBP per hour. Ideally you then want to rent out 70-90% of the time. This generates between £800 – £950 a month in income. But like renting property, the more effort you put in, the better rental fee’s you can receive. Consider these figures a baseline.

In this example you would generate between of £560 – £880 a month. Quite a big difference. But if you can also use the heat, that might save you some money somewhere else, so there may be other factors to consider.

The Hardware

If you have been thinking, “this sounds amazing, what’s the catch” well we also need to discuss the cost of the hardware in the first place and the ongoing support to maintain the system.   A single 4 processor system on a fully maintained basis (which is important if you are new to the sector) will cost circa £25,000. The good news is that is fully tax deductible, so can be offset against any tax bill.

Also based on the figures above, a system over 10 years would conservatively generate AI processing revenues between £67,200 and £105,600. There would of course be economies of scale on bigger data centres and the value of the heat has not been factored in.

The Future

Demand for AI processing is rapidly increasing and is projected to grow over the next decade. If you’re looking for a forward-thinking diversification strategy, a mobile data centre could be the perfect addition to your farm.
Farm management software gets an EasyPlan
New solutions are seeking to disrupt what was a stable farm management software market. Tech Farmer gets the lowdown on a major new entrant – an upgrade to Hutchinsons’ Omnia platform

Written by Mike Abram

Arable farm management software was probably due an upgrade. For years, Gatekeeper has been the dominant player in the market, with Muddy Boots – now Greenlight Farm Management – the main competitor, while Landmark with Geofolia had a loyal following.

But times are changing. Both Greenlight and more latterly Gatekeeper in March have been bought by Canadian telecommunications firm Telus Agriculture and Consumer Goods. Quite what that means for the future of either software is currently unknown.

That uncertainty plus a recognition of gaps in delivering what growers would ideally want from a system has encouraged new entrants into the arena, the latest of which is agriculture advice and input supplier Hutchinsons. It is launching its EasyPlan upgrade to further develop its digital offering, Omnia, which has over 4000 users, covering 1.5m ha of land.

Hutchinsons managing director Gordon McKechnie claims it is the most advanced, easy to use farm management system for UK growers.

Gordon McKechnie claims EasyPlan is the most advanced, easy to use farm management system for UK growers.

“The updates will move Omnia from a precision farming system into a new style of farm management software. It leverages the latest digital technologies, data analytics and agronomic expertise, and provides farmers with a comprehensive suite of services.

“These services are designed to optimise crop production, enhance resource efficiency and maximise profitability,” he says.

Omnia began life in 2016 as a precision farming nutrient management tool, explains Hutchinsons head of Omnia Oliver Wood.

“Since its launch the platform has evolved into a broader digital farming system offering a range of user-friendly business modules, such as cost of production, yield mapping, rotational planning and carbon mapping tools.”

The EasyPlan upgrade is the next step in its development, which Hutchinsons believes will move Omnia uniquely into the centre of an agricultural software market that covers four main areas: telemetry, precision agriculture, decision support and farm management systems.

There is a user demand for such software, according to Oliver. Over the past 18 months Hutchinsons has run focus groups with farmers, agronomists and sprayer operators where there was a consistent message that users wanted one integrated system, with a significant number also wanting it to be digital-based and paperless, he says.

Oliver Wood is aiming to deliver British-based solutions for British farmers. ©Tim Scrivener Photographer 07850 303986
….Covering Agriculture In The UK….

“There’s also been changes in the sector, with the market getting smaller, predominantly in foreign ownership, and in our opinion not delivering what users are wanting.

“We are very keen to deliver innovation into this sector,” he says. “Delivering British-based solutions for British farmers.”

The upgrade consists of either completely new functionality or rebuilds of existing functionality to deliver spray plans, spray plan auditing, record keeping, stock management and additional functionality to enable users to decide how, where and with whom to share data.

It now offers users the chance to go paperless, although printed reports are still an option, and critically maintains a core requirement of being easy to use, he says.

Lewis Mckerrow, head of field-based IT for Hutchinsons, says Omnia will help farmers and agronomists while making crop inspections, creating crop protection plans, managing stock, making and recording field applications, and analysing crop performance.

Lewis McKerrow says the information drawn from the Halo module is structured in such a way as to help the user not make any mistakes.

Integrating crop inspections into records is already required in the fruit and veg sector, and likely to become more widely needed to help justify applications and enable end-to-end traceability for supermarkets and end consumers.

Upgrades to the Scout app make that easy to achieve with pictures, notes, logged areas of weed or pest infestations, for example, transferred seamlessly into Omnia for any stakeholder to view.

“At any point users that have access to the field diary in Omnia can see the full history for the season of that crop,” Lewis says.

A completely new spray module for producing crop protection plans has been built for the upgrade. A frequently requested new feature from growers and advisers, it will allow Hutchinsons agronomists using Omnia for precision farming and nutrition recommendations to move away from using third-party systems for sprays.

“As a business we felt it’s also an area that lacked innovation. Pesticide legislation is a tricky area to deal with, labels are getting more stringent and complicated,” Lewis says.

The module allows users to easily customise how spray plans made during the season are viewed by crop, month, season or status, and whether finalised or in progress.

Top of users wish lists when making a plan was having key bits of information easily viewable on one screen. To achieve that, Hutchinsons has created a split-screen design with one half for data entry and the other an interactive window, which has different functionality depending on which part of the process is happening.

For example, it could be showing a map of the farm to easily select all the fields of one type of crop. Once selected the fields appear on the left-hand data entry side, where further drop-down menus enable the user to select key information, such as growth stage and products to be used.

The hardest functionality to develop was building a pesticide database that runs behind the scenes, Lewis stressed.

“Omnia Halo is a database of pesticide approvals with the core data taken from Fera, which allows Omnia to audit spray plans for compliance with pesticide legislation.”

Other software has similar functionality, but Lewis said two features made Halo different – firstly a daily update of the Fera data rather than the weekly standard, and secondly the database was internally managed by Hutchinsons technical agronomy specialists.

“That allows us to enhance the data.”

Enhancing the data means structuring the data so it can be more easily audited automatically. For example, often on a pesticide label there will be boxes of text that are difficult for computers to understand, such as “apply from the beginning of tillering (GS21) to up to and including second node detectable stage, and do not exceed max dose of 1.33 l/ha before stem elongation (GS30)” on a chlormequat label.

“What we do is translate that into numbers that the system can use. So, although the max dose is 2.0 l/ha, there’s a nuance that before a certain stage you can only apply 1.33 l/ha.

“So we’ve added a first application stage before GS30, where you can apply up to 1.33 l/ha, and then from GS30 onwards up to GS32 it uses the default max rate.

“I can’t overstate how much effort has gone into that process. We’ve structured 47,000 individual pesticide approvals in this way, so we can have the best pesticide audit on the market.”

The end user doesn’t see any of that, however, he notes. “In other systems they tend to give users the unstructured comments and leave it to them to decipher and decide what actions to take.

“But because we’ve structured that information, once you select a growth stage, the module then decides what applies to help the user not make any mistakes.”

Halo uses a two-stage audit process, again unlike most other systems, where an instant audit does some basic checks, such as checking a product is approved for the target crop or being used within correct growth stages or rates. Non-compliance is signalled by warning icons.

The second audit at the end of making a recommendation goes through the complete 15 different checks to make sure you’re not breaking any more complex rules taking into account previous applications and even multi-year loading of actives.

Other useful features in the spray module for sprayer operators include an on-by-default automatic spray order tool, and a calculator to help adjust how much chemical is required in the tank, for example if only two out of three fields are to be sprayed or the water volume needs adjusting.

The field diary module has been significantly extended to now allow task management and record keeping, rather than just holding crop inspection records.
Lewis Mckerrow’s top reasons to move to Omnia from Gatekeeper or Greenlight
- Cloud-based, more user-friendly experience than Gatekeeper
- Easy, but customisable access for other stakeholders (eg agronomist, sprayer operator) to access and seamlessly interact with Omnia
- Bespoke management of latest rules and regulations
- Much better map functionality for precision applications than Greenlight
- Broader scope than Greenlight
Record keeping is an area ripe for improvement as users often report a disconnect between the office and field, and not knowing whether a recommendation or task has been completed.

Omnia solves that in three ways, Lewis says. At its simplest, it allows users to create a record directly on either mobile or desktop computer; or it can create a task which when completed creates the record; or for complex farm business with multiple operators and machinery to create and allocate tasks to specific operators and machinery, schedule it, and once completed automatically create a record.

Allocated tasks will appear in a new task module in an operator’s Scout app, with, in common with existing Omnia functionality, compatibility with most popular machines and platforms.

Completed tasks are viewed in the records section making it easy to see when it was done, weather, operator, machinery, products, etc., Lewis says.

Another new module will help growers manage stock from delivery through to application. The module allows growers to manage orders from any supplier, although there is an advantage of being linked to Hutchinsons enterprise resource planning system that will automate some of the stock management processes when buying from the firm.

“The order will be tracked so as statuses change in our system that will be reflected in Omnia as well,” Oliver says. For other suppliers, delivery status will need to be manually updated.

Within Omnia there are dedicated stores for product types, such as seed, fertiliser and chemical. Multiple stores of each can also be set up.

“Updates will happen automatically. Once delivered, the inventory will be updated, and then again when it is applied,” Oliver says.

For stock taking, users can either check amounts of a product against what the system says is in store or do a blind stock take where the user just has a list of products and counts what is in store.

Pricing can be entered at any stage of the season, and users can choose whether to allocate costs from the last purchase or a weighted average across the season.

Hutchinsons has also made some minor upgrades to its business performance module in Omnia to make sure the new modules are linked and automate where possible. It provides crucial information to help growers understand how farms, fields and parts of fields are performing, Oliver says.

Using various filters, users can easily, for example, compare variable costs, yields, or net or gross margins for all fields of winter wheat on the farm. On a field level, the same can be seen on a map highlighting performance in different areas of the field.

The Omnia upgrade will be available from 7 June, with no change in the cost structure to users. To access the new modules users will need to be on either the Field Manager subscription level costing £3.15/ha or the Omnia Business Manager at £6/ha.

Business Manager subscribers will have access to the Halo audit, variable rate prescription plans and the business management tools in addition to the other new modules available through Field Manager.

Data security concerns addressed

Hutchinsons is making clear attempts to address farmer concerns around data – control, security and ownership – although whether that is enough to convince farmers to buy into a system built by an input supplier remains to be seen.

On control of who can access data, Hutchinsons has built new functionality which means for each module users can set permissions for others to either view or view and edit, and where there is pricing information, whether they can access that as well, Oliver says.

“That’s in the hands of the farmer, and can be set for any user, whether they work for the farm, for us or any other third party, so it can be tailored to business need.”

Around security and ownership of data, Oliver says the firm always had a clear policy that the data remains with the farmer, but by signing up to both ISO27001, the international standard for information security management and the new industry-led Farm Data Principles, he hopes that will brings a new level of independence to enable users to trust the company with their data.

“ISO27001 brings a whole series of policies and procedures around security, around development and what staff can and can’t do, and around access controls,” he says. “We are externally audited every year to prove we are doing what we say we are doing.”

Farm Data Principles has four pillars around data – ownership, sharing, safety and security, and how we make using data easy for users. “This clearly sets out what those standards are and as a business we have to declare how we are meeting each of those.

“There is a publicly accessible form on our website that clearly states what we are and aren’t doing.

“We are the first platform to have both of these, which we’ve done to give farmers peace of mind that we can be trusted with their data,” Oliver says.

Data is stored in cloud space rented from Microsoft Azure, which brings additional inbuilt security, while a non-commercial Hutchinsons data governance team sits between the database and Hutchinsons business with a clear remit and powers devolved by the Hutchinsons board of what can be done with data, he adds.

“If someone says, for example, can I have a look at this pricing data, the answer is no. That is empowered by our board, laid down in our terms within our data governance access, with our Farm Data Principles commitment, which is all governed and audited by ISO27001.

“It’s not just take our word for it, but built into our auditing procedures and gets externally audited,” he stresses.

What other data connections does Omnia have?

Hutchinsons didn’t announce any new data connections with the EasyPlan upgrade, on top of existing ones to the likes of John Deere, Claas and Bayer, but others are on the roadmap, according to Gordon.

“As more machinery manufacturers go to cloud-based telemetry there will be more customers asking for that,” he says. “Our roadmap for later this year is looking potentially at an AGCO connection and beyond that Case New Holland.”

Similarly, Hutchinsons is assessing and talking to a number of carbon calculators and trading platforms to see whether and how it can allow farmers to transfer data to their platforms. “But it’s not functionality we have at this time,” Oliver says. “We will see how that market develops and then make some decisions. It’s not [a market] we’re planning to enter ourselves.”

Integrations with financial or accounting software is also on the development roadmap. “We are open to creating data connections with any system where there is demand for it.”

After the controversy about using anonymised Gatekeeper data to potentially provide farmers, adviser and the wider industry information about trends from big data sets, it’s probably no surprise Hutchinsons has no immediate plans to use anonymised data in the short or even medium-term.

“It is on our radar to think about,” Oliver says. “If data comes into the system in a structured way, it potentially can be used, but in terms of what, how and when we do something like that is an entirely different question.

“Given the sensitivities around the topic, it’s not something we have any plans to do in the short or medium term. Longer term, when the market understands the benefits of amalgamated, anonymised data I think we will be a good position to do something at that point.”

What about support?

With any new farm management software, or technology generally, support for new users is vital – it’s something that both Gatekeeper and Greenlight have good reputations for providing.

Lewis says Hutchinsons recognises that the ability to offer support is crucial. How to guides and user help videos are in-built into Omnia – accessible by clicking on question icons at the top right of the screen, while three people are employed full-time to provide phone support.

“As demand increases, we’ll add further staff.”

In addition, another 12 regional Omnia digital specialists act as key account managers to visit farms one-on-one to provide sales and support.

Other new entrants to consider

Fieldmargin has grown from its initial field mapping service in 2014 to a more full-service offer including field scouting, planning and recording field work, checking compliance of pesticide applications and reporting. It, too, was recently bought in February, this time by Danish agtech firm Agreena, best known for its soil carbon platform that supports farmers transitioning to regenerative agriculture.

FMEC UK has also built its own Farm Management Suite, which provides plant protection product compliance and stock control among its modules. It also has direct API links with Syngenta’s Cropwise precision farming software, plus fleet telematic and fuel usage data for machinery regardless of manufacturer. Connections with farm accounts software help link planned and applied farm data with costs. All financial and private farm information is stored in FMS creating separation as well as an end-to-end package.
The optics of pest invasions

Light based sensors could provide early warning of pollen beetle infestation in oilseed rape writes Dr Samantha Cook of Rothamsted Research.

High tech optical sensors in fields could provide an effective means of monitoring beetle numbers arriving in oilseed rape fields, according to a new study.

Results from an optically sensed field were compared to those baited with standard water traps and in-field counting by hand. The optical sensors recorded an increase in pollen beetles two days ahead of water traps, and four days ahead of plant counts. In terms of early detection and numbers of beetles recorded this was clearly the most efficient pollen beetle monitoring method.

“Understanding the dynamics of pest immigration into a crop field helps us find effective and timely management strategies,” said Professor Emily Bick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the study, alongside scientists from Rothamsted Research, FaunaPhotonics A/S and the University of Copenhagen.

“The pollen beetle is a significant pest of oilseed rape during budding stage. Many farmers in western Europe are now abandoning the crop because damage is so severe from pollen beetles, additional insect pests, and the reduced availability of approved synthetic insecticides. Better surveillance of in-field pests could help us identify a way round the problem.”

Automated near-infrared optical sensors recorded the signal of light backscattered by insects flying through a detector beam. Researchers were able to record insects in flight and detect each insect’s wing beat frequency, which often differs from species to species. For instance, pollen beetles have a wing beat frequency of 120 Hz, so insects within the range of 100–140 Hz were considered pollen beetles.

Sensors were run continuously in fields in Denmark, alongside parallel experiments on the spatial distribution of pollen beetles in oilseed rape crops at Rothamsted.

In all fields in the study, pollen beetles were found in significant numbers and were shown to aggregate. Beetle density was related to plant growth stage, with more beetles occurring on plants after the budding stage than before inflorescence development.

“Our study suggests potential for precision agriculture to reduce insecticide use through targeting pollen beetle aggregations – in other words treating only areas of the crop where pollen beetle density is high,” said Rothamsted’s Dr Sam Cook, senior author of the study.

“Optical sensing of pollen beetles gives us more efficient monitoring in both time and space, so it is a promising tool for early warning of insect pest immigration. The aggregation pattern of pollen beetles post immigration could be used to precisely target control measures in oilseed rape crops.”

Sam Cook (L) and Emily Bick with the optical sensor

The aggregation of pollen beetles usually occurs first on the downwind edge of field and then expands to the centre. Early detection via sampling and monitoring should correspond with this migration pattern, allowing for more effective control.

A network of these or similar sensors at a crop or landscape scale could serve as the basis of a pest map, said Dr Cook.

“A system that links the number of sensed insects immigrating into a field, the temperature, and the crop growth stage would better predict the risk of economic damage and provide an avenue for fully automated pest monitoring. Sensors might even be useful for tracking natural enemies to determine if an insecticide application is necessary considering biocontrol potential.

“Alternatively, pollinators may be identified in the field to avoid non-target insecticide effects on these beneficials, thereby contributing to both pesticide reduction and biodiversity protection goals for sustainable agriculture.”

Read the full research paper here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ps.7538
Leveraging NDVI for Sustainable Land Management: Enhancing Natural Capital for Farmers and Landowners

Effectively managing natural capital is crucial for optimising land use, conserving soil health, preserving water resources, promoting biodiversity and ensuring long-term sustainability. However, this requires a deep understanding of ecosystem dynamics and the ability to monitor changes over time writes Keven Fennelly of Farmeye.

Advances in remote sensing technology have made the Normalised Difference Vegetative Index (NDVI) – one of the most widely used remote sensing indices since the 1970s – more accessible to farmers and agronomists.

NDVI offers a non-invasive and cost-effective method for assessing vegetation health and monitoring changes in land cover over time. By capturing high-resolution imagery from satellites or drones, NDVI can provide detailed insights into vegetation dynamics at a landscape scale. These insights are invaluable for identifying areas of concern such as erosion, deforestation, or invasive species encroachment, and implementing targeted interventions to mitigate these threats.

For farmers, NDVI can be used to optimise crop management practices and maximise yields. By analysing NDVI imagery, farmers can identify areas of the field experiencing stress or nutrient deficiencies and adjust irrigation, fertilisation, or pest control practices accordingly.

Farmeye’s platform has a range of interactive maps and features for the purposes of measuring, reporting, and verifying natural capital. The NDVI report feature is a valuable tool that enables fields to be compared and ranked against other fields with similar crop type, soil type, and management on a monthly or annual basis.

The NDVI index is suitable for estimating crop productivity across the year, based on how a plant’s leaf reflects energy and light. It provides insights into a crop’s current state and enables comparison with other temporal images to observe changes over time. NDVI uses the near-infrared and red bands of the electromagnetic spectrum to estimate a dimensionless indicator ranging from -1 to 1.

Chlorophyll is the pigment that reflects green waves, absorbs red waves, and makes plant leaves appear green to the human eye. A healthy plant, rich in chlorophyll, absorbs red light and reflects near-infrared (NIR) during photosynthesis. Consequently, the plant develops, grows, and contains more cell structures. With an unhealthy plant, the opposite is true.

NDVI Integration on the FARMEYE platform

In the NDVI map, blue and green signifies low levels of plant growth or chlorophyll activity, while red shades indicate high levels of plant vigour. Time-series analysis of fields for soil nutrients is a critical management tool for arable farmers. It’s much more actionable for a farmer to know that a particular field is a low index 2, having improved from a high index 1 last year, than to just have a single point in time snapshot. Knowing the direction of travel for soil nutrients makes the NMP (nutrient management planning) exercise much more efficient.

Access to year-to-year data in a colour-coded map format allows at-a-glance monitoring of soil nutrient trends, which is particularly important for elements like phosphorus and potassium, which take time to build, but can deplete quickly. Farmer interventions such as prioritising organic manures such as manure and slurry in these nutrient-depleted areas can have a dramatic impact on the overall nutrient balance across the farm.

Colour-coded map of Potassium levels on the Farmeye Platform.

Similarly, landowners can use NDVI to monitor changes in vegetation cover, assess the effectiveness of conservation measures, and identify opportunities for habitat restoration or enhancement.

NDVI data is one of the numerous application programming interfaces (APIs) that supports the Farmeye system. Recognising that one of the most important aspects of any digital agtech nowadays is interoperability, and the prevalence of various software and applications in farm operations, Farmeye operates an open policy on collaboration with potential partners.

Founded in the West of Ireland, Farmeye is now also supporting UK agriculture to become more sustainable, working with farmers, advisors, and supply chains by providing verified measurements of natural capital.
OSR monitoring network strengthened to help predict CSFB migration

AHDB will monitor cabbage stem flea beetle (CSFB) at several winter oilseed rape sites across England to track migration this autumn.

Work to track the cabbage stem flea beetle is part of a long-term effort to determine the factors affecting adult migration, with the ultimate ambition to provide a way to predict the start, duration and intensity of migration each year.

In addition to the manual monitoring of yellow water traps for adult beetles, the work will evaluate an automated monitoring technique. It will focus on sites in England, where the pest is most problematic.

Integrated Pest Management

Since neonicotinoid seed treatments were withdrawn in oilseed rape a decade ago, AHDB has invested in numerous projects on the potential of integrated pest management (IPM) approaches.

Earlier this year, Sacha White joined AHDB as a Lead Crop Protection Scientist, having previously led several AHDB-funded CSFB research projects at ADAS.

Sacha says: “We now have a good handle on the components of a CSFB IPM strategy, including strengths and weaknesses. Sowing dates are particularly influential, with a few weeks potentially making the difference between a crop that yields well and one that is written off.

“The most critical damage occurs when young crops encounter peak beetle migration, especially when soil moisture is low. Predicting migration windows would help farmers determine the lowest-risk point to sow oilseed rape.”

Monitoring method

NIAB will lead the latest phase of the monitoring work, which includes assessments of CSFB at seven core sites. Here, yellow water traps will be inspected for adult beetles twice a week during the main migration risk period. Symptoms of crop invasion by larvae will also be noted.

Local variations in CSFB beetle pressure will also be assessed at strategic locations around one of the core sites in Hertfordshire and Essex.

The monitoring data will strengthen a long-term data set that shows how CSFB migration varies annually and regionally in response to local conditions. The information will be used to further develop and validate a decision support system that predicts local migration.

Earlier this year, Bayer launched an automated yellow water trap (MagicTrap) that catches insects and identifies and counts contents at regular intervals using an integrated camera and artificial intelligence.

Sacha White, Lead Crop Protection Scientist

The MagicTraps, which have been used commercially in Germany for the past two seasons and supplied by Bayer at no cost to the project, will be co-located at the monitoring sites. This will allow comparisons between automated and manual monitoring techniques to be made.

Several farmers, mainly from AHDB’s Farm Excellence Network which includes Monitor Farms and Strategic Cereal Farms, will also test MagicTraps this autumn.

To provide an indication of migration in 2024, updates on cumulative numbers of adult CSFB at monitoring sites will be published at www.ahdb.org.uk/csfb.

The digital yellow trap for oilseed rape

MagicTrap is a fully automated digital yellow water trap, providing continuously updated information on pest pressure straight to a smartphone. It autonomously detects, categorises and counts a range of insects, ensuring pest migration events aren’t missed.

It autonomously monitors the field and lets the user know as soon as action is required. If there is a high influx of pests, it sends a notification automatically. Push notifications are sent directly to a smartphone and the analysis can be viewed anytime.

All the images received from the MagicTrap are automatically analysed using artificial intelligence. This will tell the user immediately how many flea beetle, weevil and pollen beetle are in the trap.

The high-resolution camera takes images of the trap’s contents at regular intervals and sends them to the user’s mobile phone. Data received is analysed by machine learning and made available in the MagicScout app.

Core monitoring sites (yellow water traps and MagicTraps)

1 Hertfordshire/Essex (six sites)

2 Kent (east)

3 Cambridgeshire (northwest)

4 Dorset

5 Yorkshire (north)

6 Suffolk (north)

7 Wiltshire (north)

Automated monitoring sites (MagicTraps only)

A Strategic Cereal Farm East

B Buckinghamshire & Bedfordshire Monitor Farm

C Oxfordshire commercial farm

D Cheltenham Monitor Farm

E Kent Monitor Farm

F Kingsclere Monitor Farm
Safety and stewardship with closed transfer systems

By Nick Badger, Frontier Agriculture

Modern sprayers are managed by advanced computer systems, equipped with precision tools and GPS technology to optimise applications and operated by highly skilled, qualified specialists. It’s a practice that has certainly seen advancements over the years.

However, the filling of sprayer tanks has remained a labour-intensive and time-consuming task. The method of physically adding product to such sophisticated machinery hasn’t been afforded the same technological developments.

That is until the emergence of closed transfer systems (CTS).

Adopted extensively overseas for some time, CTS equipment is becoming more established in UK agriculture. We can already see it is delivering tangible benefits, helping growers, manufacturers and sprayer operators improve on-farm safety, reduce reliance on small cans which use single-use plastics, eradicate risks of point source contamination and boost productivity.

Importantly, those investing in the technology look set to be ahead of potential future legislation surrounding the safe handling of nutrition and plant protection products too.

Nick Badger

Reducing operator and environmental exposure

At Frontier, health and safety is our number one priority and, having seen the extensive benefits from CTS globally, we partnered with Richard Garnett of Wisdom Systems to help bring the technology to UK farms.

The Wisdom FasTran 850 closed transfer unit comprises a specialist container valve and coupler that ensures a clean, dry connection, and a flow meter that delivers +/- 0.5% accuracy and dispenses at 25 litres/min.

Designed for use with tamper-proof CTS-compatible IBCs, it ensures any product transferred to the sprayer is done so quickly, safely and efficiently, achieving a 95% reduction in operator and environmental exposure.

This is important when we consider the potential risks that concentrated crop chemicals can present to water courses and aquatic habitats.

Under the Water Framework Directive (WFD), water companies must continually assess upstream threats to water sources. Research by ADAS in 2003 showed that concentrated products entered water courses through farmyard drains during sprayer filling.

It’s therefore vital that our industry adopts new practices to ensure increasingly high levels of product stewardship and safer handling practices. While improvements have been made through the use of bunding and more secure premises, CTS equipment that meets recognised standards is helping to engineer controls that ensure concentrated products are safely contained until they are diluted and ready for use.

It’s therefore easy to see the value this equipment has on farm. Many water companies recognise this too, with some encouraging farms to use CTS through grant support in catchment areas.

Importantly, this improved stewardship could also help to safeguard the continued use of key crop protection and nutrition products, as well as support the introduction of new, innovative chemistry that’s vital for long-term food production.

Improved physical safety and operator welfare

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) notes: “Health and safety is a fundamental requirement of a sustainable farming business,” but, unfortunately, agriculture has one of the worst injury rates and it costs the industry millions each year.

Thankfully, we’re seeing farmers experience improvements in this area following CTS adoption. As well as vastly reducing spills and exposure, the use of larger IBCs with a CTS means operators are no longer required to manually lift and manoeuvre multiple heavy cans, twist off tight caps or remove difficult seals. These activities, especially when done repeatedly, are a cause of significant injuries.

Less reliance on single-use plastics

The switch to larger IBCs brings benefits in terms of less packaging too, at a time when the industry is under growing pressure to reduce its use of single-use plastics.

There’s greater attention on the emissions and waste outputs of agricultural supply chains, with food and drink industries, merchants and distributors needing to comply with a range of environmental and climate-related requirements. While this involves businesses reporting on their own activities, on-farm practices can also impact a supply chain’s overall sustainability credentials.

A CTS can have a positive influence, as the compatible IBCs use significantly less plastic packaging than smaller packs of equivalent quantities. For example, a 600 litre IBC uses 20g of plastic per litre of product, whereas a 10 litre container uses 40g per litre.

The time and expense typically spent dealing with waste packaging is also removed. There are no caps or foil seals to wash and dispose of, no cardboard boxes to recycle and no cans to triple rinse, dry and arrange collection for.

Greater efficiency for improved workloads

Improved operator safety, less manual handling and faster filling are all contributing to more efficient operations on farm – by as much as 20-40%.

Many CTS users are benefitting from one or two extra tank loads per day – a big win given the pressure of increased workloads and compressed application windows, and especially important when we consider the costs associated with having the most advanced sprayers on farm, or even multiple machinery units.

For many it’s simply not feasible, whereas a CTS can provide a simpler, cost-effective, practical solution that can provide the flexibility and time to cover more hectares when ideal conditions exist.

Growing product portfolio

When we first partnered with Wisdom Systems, it was a collaboration with Certis Belchim to launch Crown MH (maleic hydrazide), a sprout suppressant for potatoes, in 640 litre IBCs as well as in 20 litre containers that supported adoption of the technology.

When the product was reapproved by the CRD in a 640 litre container, it was stipulated that the packaging must only have a top-mounted discharge valve for use with a CTS. Growers immediately saw improvements in safety as well as productivity, and demand for more CTS-compatible products has continued to grow.

Today, we’ve equipped more than 500 farms with the FastTran 850 and our product portfolio has expanded to include Stabilan (chlormequat), Roundup Energy (glyphosate) and a range of nutrients including Cearum.

More recently, we’ve partnered with Clayton Plant Protection to officially supply their Clayton Comply product in 300 litre IBCs for use with the CTS too. An emulsifiable concentrate containing 800g/l prosulfocarb for grassweed and broad-leaved weed control in cereal and vegetable crops, Clayton Comply will be an important product this autumn that can now be handled in a safer, cleaner, more efficient way. It signals a positive move for the industry and demonstrates the ongoing recognition from ag-chem suppliers that CTS is the right solution.

At Frontier, we’ve been exploring more 600 litre IBCs versus the typical 1,000 litre units to make adoption of the technology more flexible. More 300 litre IBCs are becoming available and we’re evaluating the feasibility of a 50 litre returnable container too.

If we’re to ensure the longevity and resilience of farm businesses and food production, it’s important we make this kind of technology as accessible as possible. We’re helping many operators now retrofit their sprayers, linking growers to funding opportunities via the Farm Equipment and Technology Fund and looking forward to many more product developments going forward.

More information is available at www.frontierag.co.uk/cts
3 Reasons Why Regen Farmers Should Use More Precision Technology

Regen farmers tend to be early adopters of technology because they’re very comfortable with change and challenges, but there are gains to be made from precision technology writes Steve Savage. First Published in No-Till Farmer – USA

In a 2023 US Ag Equipment Intelligence survey, regen farmers projected what technology they expected to purchase within the next five years. Even for widely-used options like variable-rate fertiliser, GPS auto-steer, auto seed shutoff and yield monitoring data analysis, more than 15% of regen farmers indicated they would likely purchase the technology in the next five years. Among technologies with less than 40% current adoption, drones, variable rate (VR) seeding and remote sensing were given at least a 15% purchase projection in that same time period.

The survey data and related commentary was collected into the ‘Precision Ag Adoption Among Regen farmers’ report. Here are three takeaways from the report regarding how regen farmers could benefit from using more precision ag technology:

1. Improved Economics

Guidance technologies facilitate an optimally efficient path through the field that eliminates overlaps and achieves full coverage. This results in immediate fuel savings, reduced wear and tear on equipment, reduced losses associated with ‘misses’ of fertiliser or pest control products, and reduced cost through avoidance of duplication during fertilisation or spraying. If equipment operators are hired staff, there can also be salary savings.

Guidance, particularly auto-steer, is becoming standard practice in row-crop agriculture in the US. Regen farmers’ adoption of auto-steer is projected to reach 80-90% by 2028, according to Ag Equipment Intelligence. Purchasing plans provided by the surveyed regen farmers suggest as much as 21% increase in adoption by 2028, which would exceed the 12% rise based on the 2017-23 average rate of increase.

VR seeding, fertiliser and chemical applications can reduce cost through reduced rates in some parts of a field, but the best economic outcome occurs when those technologies unlock greater yield potential by focusing more inputs on the most potentially productive zones.

Depending on the details of the farming operation, the greatest economic advantages may occur with certain combinations of technologies, often referred to as tech stacks, according to a 2016 USDA economic research report. Precision agriculture can also play a role in qualification for additional sources of income, including government programmes and private market incentives.

“Precision agriculture fits well with the overall reduced input focus of regenerative ag, particularly when it comes to phosphorus applications,” says Mitchell Hora, a Washington, Iowa, no-tiller and founder of Continuum Ag.

2. Agronomic Benefits

Other uses for drones involve addressing non-uniform pest infestations, delivering micronutrients and applying nitrogen in environmentally sensitive locations. Operators can fly drones over the field to identify weed species at a 1.5cm resolution, and that information can be used to develop a detailed spraying prescription for either ground or aerial/drone application. Drone-based mapping could also be used to refine nutrient supplementation or detect uneven distributions of insect and disease pressure.

In general, precision technology can make split fertiliser applications more feasible and accurate. More than 60% of regen farmers used VR fertilisation in 2023. The regen farmers interviewed in 2023 projected a 26% increase by 2028, which would mean 90% adoption. The trendline over the past six years suggests a 14% increase by 2028. The VR fertilisation rates in the USDA single crop studies are lower than the No-Till Farmer survey results, placing adoption at less than 30% in 2019.

There are companies that offer spray equipment designed to variably apply crop protection products during planting. The technology targets pests like the soybean cyst nematode, detected and mapped from soil samples with DNA sequencing techniques, or weeds detected either with on-the-move sensors or earlier drone mapping.

Post-planting crop protection for the sprayer is a popular precision technology. Smart sprayers use artificial intelligence, cameras and other sensors on spray booms as section controllers or nozzle shutoff. This reduces herbicide or other product usage, prevents coverage overlaps and eliminates sprays outside the target zone, particularly at field margins.

Regen farmers reported around 40% use from 2017-21. By 2023, there had been another 15% increase in adoption with another 11% anticipated by 2028. This trend is very similar to that estimated for growers as a whole, just delayed several years. Many growers have an interest in optimally efficient herbicide and pesticide use because of current and future pressures to reduce overall chemical use. Surveyed regen farmers projected buying an additional 11% of autoboom/nozzle shutoff tools by 2028, close to the rate of annual gain in recent years. The six year trendline estimate is somewhat higher at 13%.

3. More Detailed Crop Monitoring

Soil mapping is a key enabling factor for multiple precision agriculture practices. Soil nutrient status is used to inform variable fertilisation, but other soil properties can be used to drive planting and pest management prescriptions.

Soil mapping may increase to as much as 40% in the near future, and dealers estimate that there is growth in adoption of that technology by growers. The details of soil mapping adoption were not captured in the no-till-specific survey. It is likely that soil sampling is part of the 22% increase in adoption that regen farmers project by 2028.

There are two developments that are likely to make soil sampling a more refined process in the future. One is the use of autonomous vehicles to gather soil samples. The other is generating more complex data from soil samples. The overall biological activity of a soil can be characterised by something like the Haney test. Rapid advances in genetic sequencing technology make it possible to characterise the composition of the soil microbiome. In the future, farmers and agronomists could write prescriptions based on the amount of phosphate-cycling organisms, or presence of soybean nematodes or certain fungal pathogens.

The overall farmer and no-tiller use of satellite imagery has grown from the low teens in 2013 to nearly 30% in 2023. Another 14% of regen farmers project purchasing that technology by 2028, and the six year trendline suggests at least 12% more regen farmers will start to use satellite imagery.

Regen farmers anticipate the largest growth in precision technology use to be drones and variable-rate seeding, according to a 2023 survey.

Dealers are already offering unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone imaging services, and that may soon be the case for more than 60% of dealers. Regen farmers project a 32% increase in drone purchases by 2028, but the survey results didn’t specify how the farmers will use the drones, whether for aerial imagery, spraying, fertilising or cover crop seeding.

Grower adoption of chlorophyll/green sensors to detect nutrient deficiencies has been slow, and many of the regen farmers interviewed reported that these sensors aren’t timely enough. But with the relatively high price of fertiliser and concerns about future regulatory limits, 18% of regen farmers expected remote sensing in general to be technology they will begin using by 2028 — an increase of 15%.

When it comes to precision ag technologies that regen farmers are already using — such as variable rate fertilisation and GPS autosteer — more than 15% of respondents said they were likely to purchase the technology in the next five years.
Digital Technology Farm Network explores data-driven ‘fields of the future’
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.

Lucy Cottingham

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).

Drone monitoring cabbage field

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.

Fieldmate sensor in a crop of OSR

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.

Revesby Estate DTF Field

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.