Agri-tech consulting
Our work in agri-tech and agriculture
"Despite having responsibility across the business, I'm drawn to the work we do in agriculture because it’s so fundamental to the way we need to live our lives. Humans have to grow enough nutritious food to support the growing global population while maintaining a recognition that we have to do this in a sustainable way. Agri-tech has gone through several revolutions, and the current revolution focuses on precision and AI. Sagentia Innovation's role is to help clients navigate this significantly complex system and develop simple, usable, and sustainable solutions."
Meet Dr Alun James, Chief Technology Officer
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Agri-tech R&D focus areas and expertise:
Sagentia Innovation has a long history of developing cost-effective sensors across a range of industries. Our experience ranges from condition monitoring of farm equipment to measuring the health of animals in the field to crops in the silo. The aim is always to provide actionable insights and decision support for farm operations.
A pressing need across the agriculture sector is solving labour shortages, reducing costs, and increasing efficiency. Autonomy and automation is often regarded as the technology solution to that challenge. Our role is to de-risk these developments, to ensure that the human perspective is not lost, and to deliver the right technology solution. We have delivered this in the factory for manufacturing process improvement, in the field for precision spraying, tillage and harvesting, and in the dairy.
In agriculture, doing more with less is always a strong driver. Our role is to provide solutions that increase productivity through pinpointed resource use. For example, precision spraying – Our vision systems are key, but our knowledge of fluidic control is also critical, to minimise risk from factors such as drift, dripping, etc.
Our sustainability practice in agri-tech starts with understanding the regulatory drivers and then moves to practical implementation in the farm and the factory. There is a lot of industry talk about sustainability, but we sort the wheat from the chaff, using a science-based approach to deliver practical solutions to sustainable challenge.
Monitoring and sensing solutions always require timely insights to be delivered to the farmer. This requires a deep understanding of how best to predict the impact of any corrective action. We use an appropriate mixture of classical algorithms, empirical guidelines, and machine learning / AI. Sometimes that can be achieved through cloud-based architectures, but our edge-processing capabilities mean that can be delivered at the point-of-need, no matter how remote.
Case studies of our experience in agri-tech:
Trends in Agri-tech development:
We’ve seen much talk about future autonomous systems; although few such machines have made it beyond concept, there is progress in this direction. More machines incorporate intelligent systems, from auto-drive to precision delivery of plants, chemistry, tillage, and harvest at the right place and time. This trend will continue, but a fully autonomous fleet of machinery working in the field is still some years away. For crop protection, there are increasing regulatory restraints placed on North American and European farmers to reduce chemical use; the over-use of herbicides has led to herbicide-resistant weeds; climate change is enabling different pests to succeed, and the promise of future biological solutions has never quite delivered (to date). Aligning these diverse challenges requires sprayers, regulators, chemistry, and biological suppliers to work together to deliver sustainable solutions.
Find out more about our services
White papers and agri-tech thought leadership:
Agri-tech trends for 2024: digital maturation and sustainable productivity
Precision farming & agri-tech
Agri-tech: heralding a new agricultural revolution
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Our expertise
Our science and technology teams work cross-sector as we believe that the learnings from one sector can inform another and that clients’ projects should have access to the full range of skills from across the Group.