Drones, AI making cattle counting a dream
PGG Wrightson has launched a new stock-counting service using drones and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which it says removes all the hassle for farmers, while achieving 99.9% accuracy.
Jim Wilson comes from a farm in an area of Scotland known as Angus, near Dundee, close to the famous Carnoustie golf course. On his 120ha property Wilson grows mainly spring barley, winter wheat, canola, oats for milling and porridge and seed potatoes.
His father bought the farm in the 1930’s and Jim has carried on and expanded the operation. Then he got into precision agriculture and set up a consultancy.
“I was frustrated that the crop yields could change so dramatically within such a short distance in a paddock, so I started exploring why that happened,” he told Rural News. “People around me got interested in what I was doing so I ended up developing a partnership with some local farmers and launched a company called Soil Essentials in 2000. Now we have 20 full time staff working for us.”
Wilson has, by his own admission, a very Scottish attitude towards precision agriculture. It’s a way of making more money and the drivers that underpin his consultancy business are based on either increasing production or cutting costs.
Soils Essentials offers a range of services. It operates in agronomy where it offers various forms of soil testing including geo-referenced soil samples and soil DNA probes. The company analyses farmers’ yield maps, and does soil EMI scanning and a lot of area measuring for different crops.
It also sells auto-steering equipment and offers software for precision agriculture. Wilson has no special technology qualifications and is quick to point out that farmers can learn anything if they are motivated. He certainly is!
His big thing is ‘yield limiting factors’— anything that might hinder the growth of a plant. Referring to claims that about 40 different factors determine whether a plant will grow to its potential, he says various precision agriculture tools allow a farmer to tackle these factors.
“Let’s say there are 40 limiting factors and that 39 may be perfectly abundant, but the plant won’t grow because one is missing and that can be something like water, pH or anything,” Wilson explains. “If you remove that one limiting factor the plant will grow better until the next one comes into play and so on.
“Many yield limiting factors change in time as well, because plants need different elements as they grow during different growth phases. Therefore the yield limiting factors change in time during the life of the crop.”
One challenge with many of these factors is that they often don’t become obvious until it’s too late to take corrective action. “You can’t see things like pH levels or moisture levels in the soil, hence the need for testing which is what this business is about.”
Wilson says while limiting factors can be corrected, others such as soil type or slope of the land cannot. There farmers need to accept the situation – where yields in a particular area will be down – and reduce the input costs to make them profitable.
While much of the public face of precision agriculture is on the machinery side, Wilson believes the agronomy side is far more important and drives the whole process.
“I like technology better than many; technology enables you to do things. The agronomy drives what you need to do. So in the whole of precision agriculture I don’t think enough emphasis is placed on the agronomy of what you want to do and when you want to do it.
“All the limelight shines on the big sexy tractors steering up and down the field. These machines are only as successful as the understanding the farmer, agronomist or advisor has of the problems in those
areas.”
Wilson says crop species also play a role and different varieties have strengths and weaknesses, which limit their performance. As far as he is concerned, precision agriculture does pay and the investment is translated back into the balance sheet.
“Precision agriculture is a big range of tools and techniques; part of the skill is choosing which tool or technique is useful to that particular farm or even to that particular field. Some tools and techniques are no use at all and therefore have no economic return. Other tools and techniques are useful on particular farms.”
Wilson says knowing the level of pH and other elements in soil can reduce fertiliser use and cut the cost of running expensive equipment. He knows of a case in Scotland where a farmer reduced his lime application bill by 50% by soil sampling.
