Farmers are asked to produce with a lighter footprint, while keeping their data. Approaches hosted in Europe or Switzerland are taking form.
I am not presenting a platform.
I am looking to meet those who build this with agronomists and engineers — people of the same style, for whom the land and the data both stay in the right hands.
Some discoveries
I have come across an approach that reads the field from the air and similar approach for forest mamagement.
Agremo
Drone images and satellite images go in. What comes back is a reading a grower or an agronomist can use in the season itself: how the stand came up, where the plants are under stress, where weeds have taken hold, where a decision is needed before the machine goes out.
What holds my attention is not the gallery of maps. It is that the intelligence sits on top of images that already exist — flights already made, pictures already taken — and turns them into a picture of the land that someone who knows the field can act on. The same reading can travel toward those who fly, those who apply, and those who later have to say what the weather or the wildlife did.
Rastko Carapic – Co-Founder & Business Development
Deep Forestry
An Uppsala team, spun out of the university in 2018, that sends a drone where most flying machines stop: under the canopy, between the trunks.
A satellite sees a roof of leaves. A drone above the canopy sees the same roof, only closer. Their machine flies inside the stand. It carries lidar and cameras. It finds its own way. After the flight, their own models turn the pass into a tree-by-tree reading: height, diameter along the stem, volume, species, condition — and a photograph of each tree, from more than one angle. The forest on a desk becomes something you can walk through.
What they are after is not another map of green. It is ground truth. Forestry, like a field, has long been managed from samples: a few measured stems asked to speak for the whole stand. Here the sample is no longer the method. Each tree is an object.
They have flown this way more than a thousand times, on more than one continent. An independent forestry authority compared their stem diameters with those of a harvester: the average difference was 1.6 centimetres. A pass of about a hectare can take under twenty minutes. The airframe is built in Sweden. The reading can feed systems that already exist.
I have seen the same idea touch Spain, Japan and the Nordic stands. What holds my attention is the place they chose to look from. Precision agriculture, on a field, is the refusal to treat a hectare as one plant. This is the same refusal, applied to a forest.
https://www.deepforestry.com/
Levi Farrand — CEO and co-founder