Alex Macdonald-Smith is Chief Operational Officer of Drone Ag, developers of Skippy Scout, an automated drone flight app used by UK farmers to photograph broadacre crops.
The theme of the REAP conference is time; Alex explains why this topic is so relevant to Drone Ag.
“Crop walking is a critically important task that growers need to perform on a regular basis, and they spend a lot of valuable time doing it – time that they realistically cannot afford. Because of how time-consuming it actually is, they often end up not walking enough of a field to find potentially yield limiting factors early enough to deal with them.
“We designed our crop scouting software, Skippy Scout, with this exact problem in mind. Using Skippy to supplement crop walking, means that the bulk of the work can be done using a drone, in a fraction of the time that it would take on foot. In Skippy’s first growing season, our users saved over 750 hours of their time using Skippy Scout. They covered more ground than they would have been able to on foot, reducing potential risk to their crops in order to improve yield overall.”
REAP 2021: Changing Time(s) for Agriculture – 10th November 2021
Imagine a world where agriculture is not constrained by time. The ability to manage and manipulate time is increasing and REAP 2021 will explore the advances in technology and breakthroughs in science that is making this possible.
REAP brings together people from across the agri-tech ecosystem who believe that innovation is the engine for change. The conference bridges the gap between producer needs and technology solutions and showcases exciting agri-tech start-ups.