Winter wheat and barley
The long season, flown in stages
Establishment gaps, patchy weed pressure, septoria risk and a nitrogen plan that has to follow the field, not a flat rate.
Blocks of 10 to 120 hectares, flown as one route.
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What actually goes wrong
A cereal crop is in the ground for the better part of a year and every problem in it is patchy. Blackgrass concentrates along the tramlines and headlands. Septoria starts in the thickest, wettest part of the canopy. The nitrogen plan gets split three ways and applied flat because there is no map that says otherwise. Each of those is a decision made blind, repeated across every field on the farm.
How we set it up
A base map at establishment, then a fortnightly multispectral cadence through the stem extension and flag leaf windows, tightening when the weather turns favourable for septoria. Weed scans land before each herbicide window and produce a prescription your sprayer can load. Nitrogen splits are prescribed from measured biomass rather than a target applied evenly.
The flight calendar across a season
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Establishment counts, gap mapping and a corrected boundary for the field record.
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Weed mapping before the autumn or spring herbicide window.
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Biomass and chlorophyll for the first and second nitrogen split.
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Disease surveillance on a tight cadence, plus ear counts for the yield estimate.
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Yield forecast update, lodging map and harvest sequencing.
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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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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Targeted weed control
Spray the weeds, not the field
Cameras and on-board models find weeds plant by plant, then only the affected square metres get treated.
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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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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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Automated field mapping
The base layer everything else sits on
One flight produces a high resolution 3D model of the field: elevation, drainage lines, headlands and problem ground.
What you end up with
Recorded on your fields, flight by flight. Not a projection.
- Treated area recorded against total area for every herbicide pass
- Nitrogen prescribed per zone with the measured shortfall behind it
- Disease flags dated and located, days before a cab-level diagnosis
- A yield estimate that narrows through grain fill instead of arriving at harvest
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