For African countries like Kenya and Somalia, 2020 has brought some of the worst locust outbreaks in over fifty years. This is a story repeated in South West Asia with both Pakistan and India reporting the most severe plagues in decades. Climate change and extreme weather events are thought to be behind the sudden rise in locust numbers with hot and humid conditions favouring breeding over the past two years. It is estimated that an average desert locust swarm eats the same amount of food in one day as approximately 2,500 humans. Food crops are being decimated affecting the livelihoods…
Author: Matt Peskett
Matt Peskett
Matt has worked in digital publishing and media for over two decades across the science, technology, food and agricultural sectors. With a lifelong passion for growing his own food, Matt also produces 300kg giant pumpkins for exhibition and volunteers with the Royal Horticultural Society. He has a sizeable horticultural social media presence and has been a finalist in the Garden Media Guild's blog of the year and social media awards. Matt also dabbles in start-up investment with companies like Small Robot Company, Drone Ag and RootWave.
“I’ve tested it myself when driving a harvester, I’ve modified the settings and everything worked flawlessly” were the very positive words of Russia’s Herman Gref earlier today direct from the fields of Rostov, Russia. Gref is CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board at Sberbank – Russia’s largest bank and a leading global financial institution. This state owned financial giant is invested in Cognitive Agro Pilot – an autonomous driving system for farming equipment, such as grain combine harvesters, tractors, and crop sprayers. Gref was in attendance to test drive an autonomous combine in the fields of one of leading…
Israel based agtech firm Saturas just secured $3 million to continue investment in its remote irrigation management system. Their miniature sensors are safely embedded into the trunks of fruit trees in order to monitor available water within the trunks. The data (stem water potential) is sent continuously to the orchard grower’s electronic device(s) enabling easier irrigation decision making. This ‘decision support system for precise irrigation’ can even integrate with existing irrigation systems. Water saving & crop boosting The key advantage of such a system is a reduction in water usage (and associated costs) from the decreased instances of unnecessary irrigation. What…
Israeli start-up Greeneye Technology has announced the completion of a $7 million seed funding round led by JVP. Greeneye’s mission is to dramatically reduce chemical usage in arable farming whilst increasing productivity and profitability for farmers. The company is developing the next generation AI platform to detect, identify and spray weeds with herbicides or pesticides in real-time. The system uses cameras and AI to precisely spray only the weeds as opposed to the current broadcast spraying approach which sees bare soil sprayed, money wasted and the environment unnecessarily affected. So far trials have indicated that Greeneye’s technology reduces herbicide usage…
Rusagro, Russia’s largest integrated agricultural holding company, has entered into a contract with Cognitive Pilot, a tech start-up backed by Russia’s largest bank Sberbank. The deal will see Cognitive Pilot’s farming specific autonomous driving software Cognitive Agro Pilot installed on 242 combine harvesters used by Rusagro. The award winning Cognitive Agro Pilot system has already been successfully adopted in the USA, Brazil, and China, as well as in several other Russian regions. By freeing up the vehicle’s operator from driving and steering, Cognitive Agro Pilot allows him or her to focus instead on adjustments to the header and beater drum and controlling…
Scientific field trials on two commercial dairy farms in Belgium and the Netherlands have already proved the value of AI technology in the early detection and treatment of illness in dairy herds. Ida, developed by Dutch agtech company Connecterra, uses a wearable sensor, cloud computing, integration of data sources and AI for early detection of diseases such as ketosis, mastitis or digestive problems. A field trial of Ida was conducted within the context of the Horizon2020 Internet for Food and Farm project and supported by Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Half of the 200 dairy cows were chosen at random…
Born from Sly Agri Ltd (a British company founded in 2006), Horizon Agriculture has announced a new type of no-till seed drill as the business focuses on the manufacture of regenerative and conservation agricultural equipment. A single square foot of soil contains billions of micro-organisms which include fungi and bacteria. Together with earthworms these form a critical part of the nutrient system that feeds the roots of growing plants. Not disturbing the soil – ‘no-till’ for farmers and ‘no-dig’ for gardeners, is now widely understood to boost both soil health and resulting crop yields. Sowing seeds whilst minimising the disturbance…
Kubota Canada has unveiled its new FastBale – a continuous baler-wrapper that has already proved its worth in Europe over the past four years. This machine uses a massive 800mm intake rotor equipped with a 25-knife chopping system and two chambers to keep things moving. According to Travis Grubb, Product Specialist of Agricultural Equipment at Kubota Canada, “It’s the first and only continuous round baler on the market.” In a 2019 interview for Canadian Agro-News website RealAgriculture, Grubb explained how the hay tool worked: “The machine is basically two balers and a wrapper all in one. So there’s a pre-chamber where…
A few years ago Farmers Edge integrated daily satellite imagery into its FarmCommand® platform for the first time, this was a real boon for users because up until that point imagery was arriving sporadically and much too late, with farmers often already having made decisions about when to irrigate a crop based on their own visual inspection. Farmer’s Edge then partnered with Planet, an integrated aerospace and data platform company that operates the world’s largest fleet of earth imaging satellites, to use and distribute imagery from Planet’s three satellite constellations – RapidEye, Planet “Doves”, and SkySat – among other sensors,…
Founded in 2009, Nebraska based CropMetrics provides real time soil irrigation information to farmers using soil moisture probe technology and associated cloud based forecasting software. Four years after raising $1.3 million, the company has been aqcuired by CropX, a leading global soil sensing and agricultural analytics company. The merger will enable current CropMetrics and CropX customers and partners to access a combination of in-soil data, advanced farm management analytics and decision-support tools. “We intend to lead the market for on-farm irrigation and nutrient management tools in the years ahead and the acquisition of CropMetrics completes a critical step towards that goal.…
