Assessing New Fields (of Vegetables)
Multi-sensor insights for smarter crop management
Our Role
Applying security-sector sensing and evaluation expertise to precision agriculture
Sometimes our work looks nothing like security. In this project, we developed and trialled a multi-sensor crop assessment technology, drawing on sensing approaches adapted from the security sector.
By integrating these systems onto existing farming machinery, the goal was to offer better crop insights, help reduce waste, and support productivity.
It’s a neat example of how we learn something in one area and apply it somewhere completely new: security one day, agri-tech the next.
PUBLIC SOURCE: FarmPep
Behind the Scenes
The Challenge
Growers need accurate crop information to plan harvests and manage supply chains, yet collecting it manually can be a challenge. We set out to explore whether a vehicle-mounted sensing solution could provide reliable, real-time crop insights.
What We Did
We worked with growers to develop and trial a novel multi-sensor crop assessment technology. Drawing on our expertise in sensing and data interpretation, we designed a vehicle-mounted system capable of collecting crop data during routine field operations. A key challenge was translating large volumes of sensor data into meaningful measures of crop condition, density and field variability under real-world conditions. Through field trials and analysis, we demonstrated the potential for practical, real-time crop intelligence at scale.
The Outcome
The project demonstrated the potential of multi-sensor technology to provide real-time crop intelligence for harvest planning and forecasting. It also showed that expertise developed for finding threats in security settings can be just as useful for finding leeks in a field.