The Jersey Royal Company has already developed its own in-house system, which records all their inputs, including fertiliser, seed and the machines used. The live system sends data back to head office, which then gives instructions to operators via their tablets or mobile phones.
They have also developed other apps, which feed into their system for specific tasks, as Mike Renouard, Jersey Royal Company technical director, explained.
‘One is soil sampling,’ he said. ‘We have about 1,600 fields we operate every year and we take a sample of soil from every one to put it through our home soil lab. Basically, what we are looking for is the potato cyst nematode. It’s important to know how much nematode we have in the soil, but it can be sporadic across the field.
‘In previous years we’ve been zig-zagging across the field and doing it by hand. Now we have a quad bike with a sampler and GPS that sets the points and takes the sample. Doing that with GPS every year you are taking from the same point, so you are getting a much more representative sample and you can see whether the inputs are working.
‘This year we have four in-field weather stations across the Island which feed into a computer model and predict when we should be spraying for potato blight. JT has set up the new LoRa [long-range] network and were looking for projects, so we upgraded our weather stations to work on the network. They are taking weather data from each station and sending it back every 15 minutes.
‘The LoRa network has been very good. The old technology we were using before was radio technology, so if someone set up some temporary traffic lights or something it interfered with the signal and we were losing lots of data. Now the LoRa network is much more reliable and we are getting more information back.’
Perhaps most exciting are the new potentiometers that Mr Renouard and his team are using, which also send data via the LoRa network. These are measuring the moisture level in the soil, which helps them determine when to irrigate crops.
‘On top of that we also have some new nitrate sensors attached to them which are brand new and still under development with a university in the UK, and we are looking at how nitrates move through the soil. Together with the Action for Cleaner Water group this will be useful in determining how we input and reduce nitrogen in the future.’
It’s nothing new that agriculture is embracing technology and using it to improve efficiency, raise yields and protect the environment, but Jersey could be at the cutting edge, as Professor John Crawford from Rothamsted Research would like to work with local farmers through Digital Jersey’s whole-island ‘sandbox’ test-bed initiative.
lYou can read an interview with Professor John Crawford in October’s Business Brief briefci.com.
