All posts by Dan Bloomer

Dan is the part time Manager of LandWISE Inc and one of the small group that established it in 1999. For the rest of his professional life he runs Page Bloomer Associates, a consultancy focused on sustainable land and water management and community development
AgTech, Conference, Drainage, LandWISE People, Orcharding, Precision Agriculture, Projects, Research, Soil

Tim Herman

Tim Herman is Technical Manager – Crop Production at New Zealand Apples & Pears Inc. which he joined in 2013.

His role includes managing the R&D portfolio for the industry and ensuring the outcomes from it are integrated into commercial crop management programmes.

Tim has a strong track record as a technical researcher and advisor in crown research and in industry. LandWISE first worked with Tim to understand slug migration patterns in no-till and strip-till cropping paddocks.

In his LandWISE 2018 presentation, Tim will introduce  “Smart tools to improve orchard drainage“.  This is a new MPI Sustainable Farming Fund project, in which LandWISE is partnering with NZAPI to investigate high precision drainage in existing orchards.

Severe wheel ruts are common especially in wetter seasons. The immediate problem of tractor access for bin shifting is compounded by poor conditions for pickers and the less obvious impact of fruit rots increase. In more severe cases the ruts greatly increase picking costs as the use of mobile hydraulic picking ladders is made difficult, unsafe or impossible. In some cases, harvest costs are reported to have doubled. 

Despite numerous attempts to rectify puddles and mud, the problem remains. The project will adapt and pilot use of precision technologies to survey, design and implement surface drainage plans that minimise ponding risk and reduce these negative impacts.

These will be supported by guidelines for wheel track management to provide a secure base for harvest traffic. This will become even more critical as the industry  automation with picking platforms and robotic harvesters.

 

Agronomy, AgTech, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Nutrients, Research

Bruce Searle

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Bruce Searle is well known to LandWISE regulars having been on the Board for many years and an active contributor at many conferences and other events.

A crop physiologist in the Integrated Crop Production Systems group, Bruce leads the Plant & Food team researching onion crop development and modelling. His group is responsible for recording the life histories of 2,000 individual onion plants!

These data have informed development of an on-line tool to assess crop performance and help growers understand if crop development (and yield) is limited by established population, plant growth or both.

The collaboration with LandWISE has combined detailed plot scale work with whole paddock surveys to help Onions New Zealand growers understand the drivers of crop variability.

A small trial within this project looked at fertiliser rate and timing options when canopies are variable. Can we reduce rates in small canopy areas and still get the potential yield?

Agronomy, AgTech, Conference, Irrigation, LandWISE People, MicroFarm, Precision Agriculture, Projects, Research, Sensing, Soil, Water

Dan Bloomer

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Dan Bloomer is the Manager of LandWISE having been instrumental in our formation and evolution since 1999. He and partner Phillipa established the Centre for Land and Water in Hastings and host the LandWISE MicroFarm.

The 2018 conference sees the wrapping up of three years of Onions NZ research in partnership with Plant & Food, much of the activity being undertaken at the MicroFarm. LandWISE has captured numerous paddock scale images of the onions crops using satellites, UAVs, sensors and smartphones. This has given insights into which tools have strengths for what purposes at what crop growth stages.

Using algorithms proposed by Plant & Food, LandWISE developed the on-line tool SmartFarm which allows smartphone captured crop development data to identify different management action zones and give guidance to the degree of variability.

Dan is particularly interested in soil and water issues, how we can continue to benefit from farming while maintaining or enhancing profitability and environmental health.

Dan has developed many resources for irrigators to check their systems. He spent many years on the Board of Irrigation New Zealand, developed Codes of Practice for Performance Assessment and has run many training programmes.

In recent years his attention has been drawn to precision drainage technologies, and he uses OptiSurface to understand and quantify ponding and erosion risk in paddocks and to design solutions for surface drainage. 

Dan actively scouts people,  technologies and problems, identifying opportunities to bring them together to effect change on farm. As such, he has initiated LandWISE’s research and extension programmes including some new initiatives to be launched at LandWISE 2018.

Dan represents LandWISE on the Precision Agriculture Association of New Zealand Executive Committee and is a frequent presenter at conferences and seminars.

When not working for LandWISE, Dan is an independent consultant at Page Bloomer Associates.

 

Agronomy, Conference, events, LandWISE People, Nutrients, Plant Health, Soil, Water, Weeds

Dan Drost

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Professor Daniel Drost is a vegetable researcher and extension specialist from Utah State University.

Dan Drost grew up on a small diversified animal and crop farm in Michigan (USA). He graduated from Michigan State University with a BS and MS degree in Horticulture. In 1983, he moved to New Zealand to teach Horticulture at Massey University. He returned to the US in 1987 to study at Cornell University where he was awarded a PhD in 1991 in Vegetable Crops and Plant Physiology. 

Dan’s research and outreach efforts focus on small intensive production systems, sustainable and organic agriculture, and how land-use management impacts field and farm scale productivity. In his 25 years at Utah State, he has authored more than 150 extension and scientific articles on vegetable production and management practices, shared his understanding of farming systems with producers, scientists and industry leaders around the world, and focused his attention on sustainable vegetable cropping systems that are farm appropriate, socially acceptable, and economically viable.

One of our invited international keynote speakers, Dan was bought to New Zealand in conjunction with Onions NZ and Plant & Food Research to discuss sustainable production systems. His presentation to LandWISE 2018 was titled “Sustainable Crop Production: Field and Farmscape Management for Sustainability”.

Dan says,

“Insects, diseases, nutrient management, and weeds pose yearly threats to vegetable productivity and sustainability. This presentation will address how to best manage the farmscape (whole farm) to protect and mitigate these risks in field and farm settings. Using examples from a variety of vegetable crops (annuals, perennials, intensively managed) grown in a range of settings, I will outline how modern farms adapt to and deal with yearly uncertainty.“

Dan and colleagues have completed a lot of work on high tunnels for crop production. See a video here.

You can hear and discuss sustainable production with Dan at LandWISE 2018 in Havelock North on 23-24 May.

 

 

Dan’s attendance at LandWISE 2018 was supported by AGMARDT

Agronomy, AgTech, Automation, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Precision Agriculture, Research, Robotics, Sensing, viticulture

Armin Werner

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Armin Werner has a background in crop production sciences and as director of an Institute on Land Use Systems at ZALF in Germany worked on enabling new technologies for sustainable development.

Since 2013 Armin has headed the Precision Agriculture Science group at Lincoln Agritech (LAL), a subsidiary of Lincoln University in New Zealand. This covers Precision Farming (arable crops, pastures), Precision Livestock Farming, Precision Horticulture, Precision Spraying as well as Agricultural (Outdoor) Robotics.

Armin’s work has led him to create strong linkages and collaboration projects between various scientific disciplines and sectors including academic institutions, researchers and farmers.

Current projects  include trans-disciplinary and technology-based research in NZ for various high-value crops; e.g. on fruitlet counting and sizing for apple crop load management. He manages also the Robotic Spearhead project of the National Science Challenge ‘Science for Technological Innovations’ that develops new knowledge for small, highly adaptable and flexible robots.

At LandWISE 2018 Armin will update delegates on the “Precision Grape Yield Analyser”, a research project on vineyard sensing and yield forecasting that Lincoln Agritech is undertaking.

Armin says,

“The ‘Precision Grape Yield Analyser’ is an ongoing interdisciplinary MBIE-project, supported by NZ Wine Growers and several vineyards. Grapevine yields can vary between seasons by a factor of 2 and New Zealand grape growers are keen to avoid unplanned high yields. To assess the expected yield on the block level very early in the season we develop sensing tools and computer models. AI-based sensor fusion combines data from optical and microwave ‘scanners’ and feed the results into a continuously learning, predictive computer model.

Listen to Armin and discuss his work with him and others at LandWISE 2018 in Havelock North on 23-24 May.

AgTech, Conference, Drainage, LandWISE People, Nutrients, Soil, Water

Aldrin Rivas

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Aldrin Rivas is a Catchment Hydrologist at Lincoln Agritech. He has over ten years of professional experience in the fields of water and environmental science, engineering, and management; and has worked for private and government entities.

Aldrin has experience in denitrification in natural and engineered systems and will tell delegates at LandWISE 2018 about a Lincoln Agritech, ESR and Aqualinc project investigating woodchip bioreactors to remove nitrate from drainage water. Some say this is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Others say it’s catching the horse and putting it somewhere safe!

With a mixed background in engineering and science, Aldrin is involved in a variety of Lincoln Agritech projects including the Ground Water Mitigations project and the Transfer Pathways Programme.

His interests include:
• Groundwater
• Denitrification in the vadose and saturated zones
• Vulnerability assessment of freshwater resources
• Integrated catchment development and management
• Water supply systems and management
• Environmental and hydrological modelling

You can hear and discuss this with Aldrin at LandWISE 2018 in Havelock North on 23-24 May.

Conference, LandWISE People, Plant Health, Precision Agriculture, Research, Sensing

Taylor Welsh

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Taylor Welsh works at Plant & Food Research as part of it’s Biosecurity Research Group. Taylor’s work includes bee and pollination based research in Entomology and Embedded Systems .

Taylor is currently working towards a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering based at the University of Canterbury where he previously completed his BSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Taylor and colleagues from Plant & Food Research and the University of California have developed a way to automate insect trap checking. They measure the wingbeat of an insect as it enters a monitoring (pheromone) trap and are building a library of data for relevant insects for the Asia Pacific region. The technology will hopefully reduce the need to manually check the thousands of traps used for biosecurity.

You can hear and discuss this with Taylor at LandWISE 2018 in Havelock North on 23-24 May.

 

 

Conference, LandWISE People, Nutrients, Research, Soil

Matthew Norris

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Matt Norris is a research associate at Plant and Food Research within the Sustainable Production (Field Crops) team in the Hawke’s Bay. 

Matt has a background in soil science and chemistry and a keen interest in sustainable nutrient management including modelling nutrient losses from arable and vegetable production systems.

Matt is responsible for leading and managing a range of environmentally focused research projects. His primary focus areas relate to nutrient management, specifically quantifying N and P losses from arable and vegetable production systems. Additional areas of research include N mineralisation dynamics from dairy effluent amended soils and developing novel soil testing approaches for informing N management decisions.

Matt will present both a talk and a practical demonstration on  a Quick Test for Nitrate, a way to rapidly determine how much available nitrogen is in the soil for crops to access. LandWISE and Plant & Food used this in our Onions NZ /SFF research this season to determine how much fertiliser we might apply when we had areas with different size canopies.

You can hear and discuss this with Matt at LandWISE 2018 in Havelock North on 23-24 May.

AgTech, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Precision Agriculture

Shane Wood

A LandWISE 2018 invited speaker, Shane Wood’s topic is “Information from grapevine to desk for timely decision making”. He will explain how apps and cloud systems can replace bits of paper and get information where it is needed in the most timely fashion.

Shane has always been passionate about harnessing the power of data to produce powerful information for better business insights.  For over 25 years his company, Information Power, has delivered software solutions for Healthcare, Education and Emergency Management sectors.

Information Power launched Vinea five years ago to provide growers in the Viticulture and Horticulture industry with software that dramatically simplifies the collection and management of data associated with resources (labour, equipment and consumables), crop measurements (qualitative and quantitative) and environment. In the last year processed over 3 million transactions through the Vinea Cloud saving growers time, eliminating paper and delivering new insights.

Aside from being a statistician and data scientist, Shane is also passionate about Argentine Tango and is preparing for LandWISE 2018 by spending two weeks dancing in Buenos Aires.

 

Agronomy, AgTech, Conference, LandWISE People, Plant Health, Precision Agriculture, Research, Sensing

Sarah Pethybridge

Assistant Prof Sarah Pethybridge‘s career spans from Tasmania, through Plant & Food Research in New Zealand to Cornell University in New York. She has a focus on vegetable disease management, and a goal to provide reliable information to vegetable growers and industry stakeholders to encourage adoption of durable management strategies and tactics.

A LandWISE keynote presenter, she described leading techniques and technologies to help optimise control tools and reduce the frequency of false positive or negative decisions.

Sarah told us, “We are now in the second year of our project with the center for imaging science at Rochester Institute of Technology looking at hyperspectral data to detect flowering in snap bean to optimize timing of fungicides, and using canopy density as a risk factor. We are also expanding this work into beets to detect and differentiate abiotic and biotic stress. In the digital agriculture arena, we recently released three apps on disease detection, quantification, and spatial analysis of epidemics using pixelated data.”

Sarah’s travel to New Zealand is supported by Cornell University,  McCain Foods, Heinz-Wattie and AGMARDT

 

              

Many thanks to AGMARDT, sponsors of our international presenters