Potatoes
Blight, irrigation and a crop you cannot see
Blight surveillance on a tight cadence, irrigation uniformity from thermal imaging, and a yield estimate before lifting.
Blocks of 5 to 60 hectares, usually irrigated.
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What actually goes wrong
Potatoes carry two problems at once. Late blight moves fast enough that a few days of delay changes the outcome, and the standard answer is a protective spray programme applied across everything on a calendar. Irrigation is the other: a blocked nozzle or an under-delivering arc runs for weeks while the crop underneath quietly fails, and none of it is visible from the headland.
How we set it up
Multispectral flights on a short cadence through the blight risk window, always compared against the field's own history rather than an absolute threshold. Thermal flights during the irrigation season locate leaks and dry patches to a coordinate. A counting flight before lifting gives the estimate that the storage and haulage booking depends on.
The flight calendar across a season
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Establishment counts and ridge uniformity.
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Nitrogen zoning and the first irrigation uniformity check.
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Short cadence disease surveillance with a change layer per flight.
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Thermal irrigation flights fortnightly, plus a check after every repair.
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Yield estimate and the haulm destruction plan by zone.
Capabilities in play, in order of how much they carry
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Early disease detection
See the infection before the eye can
Multispectral imaging picks up stress, fungal infection and nutrient shortfall days before symptoms are visible from the cab.
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Irrigation analysis
Find the dry corner and the buried leak
Thermal imaging exposes dry patches, leaks and uneven coverage so water goes where it is actually needed.
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Yield forecasting
Count what is actually out there
Drones count plants, fruit or ears and turn the counts into a yield estimate for each part of the field.
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Precision fertilisation
Feed the rows that are short
The system works out which parts of the crop are under-supplied and builds a variable rate map for the spreader.
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Soil compaction detection
Read the tramlines the crop is drawing for you
Growth patterns, imagery and machine data together show where heavy traffic has closed the soil up.
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Field decision assistant
A recommendation, not another image folder
The assistant reads every layer for a field and answers in plain language: what is wrong, where, and by when.
What you end up with
Recorded on your fields, flight by flight. Not a projection.
- Blight flags dated and located, with the change since the last flight attached
- Irrigation anomalies given coordinates instead of a general area
- Water applied recorded per irrigated hectare
- Storage and haulage booked against a measured estimate
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