Intelligence-led planning key to maximising yield
- In the press
- Scientific opinion
AS INNOVATION in the agritech sector continues to move on at breakneck speed, the challenge for growers and farmers is often not that the technology to help them isn’t available, but that they can’t settle on an approach to take.
Technology is developing at such a rapid rate that it is a challenge to stay ahead of the curve, with new technologies bringing in new approaches to planning, growing, and harvesting.
Vidyanath (Vee) Gururajan, managing director at B-Hive Innovations, believes that while the speed of agritech development is encouraging, the meaning behind deluge of data it is creating is often getting lost.
The technologies that stand out as really being ‘cutting edge’ are those that improve and streamline the decision-making process. At the moment, everybody is data driven, and there is plenty of big data to work with.However, there is now so much to look at it is easy to lose the sight of why they are doing it in the first place. We need to be using the technology to create meaningful insights – if you aren’t doing that, there is no point gathering “big data” it in the first place.
A deluge of technology is being pushed at these growers, but without them pulling intelligence and insight from it, it has limited value.
When it comes to managing not only supply and demand, but also understanding variability of the crop whilst its growing will bring additional capability and intelligence into crop and make the biggest impact on the marketable yield.
The conventional approach to this is using sample data and drawing inferences from that, but this doesn’t take into account the crop variation. If you can use technology to go beyond the sample, you can get full-field intelligence and realise more marketable value by knowing exactly what you’ve harvested at the time of harvest.
Taking potatoes as an example; if you’ve got technology that can give you field-level crop insight and give you intelligence on size, count and variation, that puts you in a really strong position when it comes to marketing the crop and realising the right value for the size portions grown based on the demand.
industry. We’re incredibly excited about the future, as we begin to help even more fresh produce growers with their technological needs.”
Vidyanath (Vee) Gururajan, Managing Director, B-hive Innovations
By making informed decisions early in the process, farmers, packers and retailers are also able to ensure that wastage is minimised, something that is increasingly important for those growing at scale.
Vee says: “As we look to minimise waste and ensure that processes are as environmentally sound as possible, it is important Agri-Tech innovations are supporting growers and farmers to reduce crop imbalance.
“Particularly for larger growers, this will help them meet company-wide commitments to achieve environmental goals, such as reducing carbon emissions and food waste. Technologies like HarvestEye can play a big role in this by bringing as much intelligence into the early stages of the planning process as possible.”
As the development of new technologies continues apace, Vee and the team at B-Hive Innovations are keen to ensure they maintain their focus on improving processes throughout planning, growing and harvesting.
As we see our role as bringing new ideas to market and seeing how they can help farmers and growers. We’re developing technologies that will bring real change to the way crops are planned and grown, but we’re also adapting and refining existing technologies from other sectors to improve the process.“TuberScan is one such innovation, taking technology originally developed for the military applications and working out how it can be used in the farming world.
This project is funded by UKRI, and we are working with the University of Manchester and Harper Adams University to create demonstration units.
“The technology is the first application of its kind, providing interventions during crop growth based on whole population data, rather than just samples. If successful, it has the potential to act as a catalyst for further innovations for precision-based equipment such as intelligent sprayers.
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