Understanding the impact of timing on crop performance, pest control, pasture management and how to overcome its limitations with emerging agri-tech.
Jonathan Gill, Mechatronics & UAV Researcher at Harper Adams University is looking at the benefits for soil health of using smaller, lighter machinery. The Hands-Free Farm has just completed its second year and will be planting its third crop for a 2022 harvest.
Dr Mark Else, Head of Crop Science and Production Systems at NIAB EMR, is leading work on advanced irrigation techniques, focussed on developing and delivering precision irrigation strategies for commercial growers, where demand is matched with supply
Liangxiu Han, Professor of Computer Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, is leading work to develop a robotic rover platform to offer automated intelligent soil and plant nitrogen diagnosis.
Sarah Morgan, Postdoctoral Scientist at Rothamsted Research, is currently leading the Cell Grazing project which aims to evaluate the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of traditional set-stocked grazing in comparison to a management intensive grazing system known as ‘techno-grazing’.
Dr Shaun Coutts, Senior Lecturer at LIAT discusses a series of projects experimenting with the use of machine vision to improve the accuracy of inter row cultivation for controlling blackgrass in cereal crops.
Ruben Sakrabani, Associate Professor in Soil Chemistry, Cranfield Soil and Agrifood Institute, is working to validate carbon capture fertilisers, in which waste organic matter is used to fix waste CO2 to create a high-carbon organic alternative to industrial fertiliser.
Time and place are two key factors in precision agriculture and there are some significant developments happening in Earth observation and connectivity that will be enablers of a new generation of agri-tech.
James Fortune, Final year PhD student at University of Hertfordshire discusses how warmer autumns will impact inter-species interactions in diseases of oil seed rape
John Stamford – Plant physiology post-doctoral researcher at the University of Essex
Marwa Mahmoud, Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge, talks about applying her expertise in computer vision and machine learning to livestock, in particular to provide early warning of contagious disease in sheep.
Professor Antony Dodd, Research Group Leader at the John Innes Centre, leads a team conducting fundamental research to understand the processes that allow plants to measure the time of day; an area of study known as chronobiology.