Agri-Innovation Den: Innovation in agriculture machinery

The sky is literally the limit. The Satellite Applications Catapult has been looking at how commercial services can be developed using free satellite data from Sentinel 1, an EU-funded space mission, to monitor crop growth.

This has been followed up with a project to test and demonstrate the service, with an aim to make it commercially available to farmers by the end of 2017. Crop growth and soil moisture data, combined with weather forecasts and updates from customers, can help farmers predict and control crop growth, forecast peaks in demand and maximise market value.

Data is fed to actuators which adjust inputs automatically. This self-managing system enables farmers to monitor crops and livestock and act promptly when something goes wrong. Mark Rutter of Harper Adams University College is working with the Agricultural Engineering Precision Innovation (Agri-EPI) Centre, which has received a £17.7 million Government investment to provide engineering and precision agriculture solutions for the agri-food industry.

He says: “It is very much about trying to improve economic performance in farming through getting better uptake of new technologies, knowledge and practices. We are actually working with F1 Williams. It is not that we are trying to make tractors quicker, but they are really good at instrumentation.

“They can get data. They can process it in real-time. It is about using their technology, their expertise, so we can use it in real-time when we are making decisions out on-farm. “We have satellite farms spread across the country monitoring what is going on at farm level so we can try and get some understanding of variability within and between farms.”

Innovators are removing the barriers which prevent connections between tractors, weigh scales, weeders and other machinery onfarm, thus enabling farmers to use information from the field to inform key decisions in a timely manner.

Dave Ross, chief executive of Agri-EPI, says smart technology can aid farm management, efficiency, productivity and ultimately profit. He says: “An internet of things environment could mean interconnected tractors, machinery, even individual animal monitoring systems, will provide the future farmer with realtime farm performance measures.”