Hops
A wall of canopy you cannot see into
Downy mildew and spider mite surveillance from above, plus vigour mapping across a trellis that hides everything at ground level.
Yards of 2 to 50 hectares.
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What actually goes wrong
A hop yard in July is a seven metre wall of canopy. Walking it tells you about the outside row and almost nothing about the middle of the block. Downy mildew and spider mite both start in pockets, and both are far cheaper to deal with early. The crop is high value, the treatment programme is intensive, and the whole thing is applied on the assumption that the block is uniform.
How we set it up
Overhead multispectral flights read the canopy the ground crew cannot reach, on a cadence tight enough to catch a pocket while it is still a pocket. Vigour mapping runs by row and by bine position. Findings are ranked into a scouting route so the crew walks to the worst rows first rather than sampling.
The flight calendar across a season
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Establishment and bine count per hill.
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Vigour mapping by row and nitrogen zoning.
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Mildew and mite surveillance on a tight cadence, ranked scouting routes.
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Health surveillance and the yield estimate for the contract.
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Picking sequence by block from measured maturity.
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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Automated pest monitoring
Standing patrol over every hectare
Regular flights check fields for pest damage and mark the affected areas on a map you can act on.
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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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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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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.
- The middle of the block surveyed as often as the edge rows
- Scouting routed to ranked areas rather than sampled at random
- Nitrogen zoned to measured vigour by row
- Contract volumes estimated from counted cones
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